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The
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLJTES

PAGE

View over the Forest from near Malwood. Etched bv Alexander

Ansted Frontispiece

A Forest Heath, near Lyndhurst. Etched by John Fullwood to face 22

The Rufus Glade. By Lancelot Speed ,, ,, 54

Herding Swine in the New Forest. By Lancelot Speed „ ,, 76

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

In the Forest near Lvndhurst

9

The Queen's House, Lyndhurst 11

Cottage at Lyndhurst i?

A Dead Giant, Mark Ash 15

Charcoal Burner's Hut, Bolderwood 10

Matley Passage and Matley Bog 25

Knightwood Oak, Mark Ash 29

The Heronry at Vinney Ridge 31

The Adder-Catcher ■j-j

Brockenhurst Church ^r

Bridge near Brockenhurst 36

The Forest Ponies

45

218395

4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Beaulieu Abbey 59

Gate House, Beaulieu 62

Beaulieu 63

Interior of Beaulieu Church 65

The Edge of the Forest, near Lymington 67

The Harbour, Lymington 69

A Creek on the Beaulieu River 70

Beaulieu River at Buckler's Hard 72

Highcliffe 77

THE NEW FOREST

CHAPTER I

THE CENTRAL FOREST AND ITS CAPITAL

The wholly foreign character of its creation — Its vast extent — The alleged cruelty in its
aff'oresting — Modern views — The nature of forest laws — The forest preserved by
their survival — Lynd hurst the centre and capital of the Forest — The Verderers'' Hall
and Court — The pilgrimage to Mark Ash — Swan Green — The wild and open forest —
The Lymington stream — The hush of the forest — The progressive splendour of the trees —
The wealth of ornatnent in the old woods — The charcoal-burner^ s hut — Voices of the
forest — Alone in the sanctuary.

The historical link which the New Forest has with the associations
in every English mind is fixed to the era of the Normans. It was the
foreign Norman and Angevin Kings of England who made and used the
forest. It lay in the same county, and within a ride of their palace
and capital at Winchester; and they took their sport from Mai wood on
their way to Rouen, riding down after a few days' deer-shooting to
Beaulieu or Lymington, where the galleys waited to take them across the
Channel, much as the royal yachts wait to take Her Majesty Queen
Victoria across the Solent to Osborne.

But the subsequent part played by the forest as a hunting ground
for kings, and a district exempt from the general law of the land, and
at the absolute disposal of the sovereign, is entirely eclipsed by the
picturesque and dramatic incidents which tradition has assigned to its
violent creation by the first Norman monarch, and its requital, not only
by the violent death of the second, but by those of two other children

6 THE NEW FORESr

of the Conqueror in this fatal precinct. His son, Richard, who was
supposed to be in his disposition the special image of his father, when not
yet of an age to be girded with the belt of knighthood, was the first victim.
He is said to have been fatally injured by the branch of a tree when
riding after a stag; and there is a record in Domesday Book of lands
restored by his father to their rightful owner as an offering for Richard's
soul.^ The second son of the Conqueror who died in the forest was
another Richard, an illegitimate child, whose death seems to have been
forgotten in the greater catastrophes of the death of the elder Richard
and of Rufus, which preceded and followed it.

Whatever belief is to be given to the tale of cruelty in its
afforesting, the size and character of the district, which the Conqueror
devoted to his use as a " single and mighty Nimrod," by the simple act of
putting it under forest law, is a measure of the scope of that imperial
mind. The area was as large as that of the Isle of Wight. It was
bounded on the north by the line from the river Avon to the river Ouse,
separating Hampshire from Wiltshire ; by the river Avon on the west,
down to Christchurch. By the sea from Christchurch to Calshot Castle ;
by the Southampton Water, and by the river Ouse. Within these
boundaries are about 224 square miles, containing 143,360 acres of land,
of which even now 90,000 acres are still within the boundary of the
forest. Its natural features were such as to make it a hunter's paradise.
From the swirling salmon river at Christchurch, to the wide lagoon of
Southampton Water, it exhibited and still contains, almost every natural
feature which made the forests, " reguni -penetralia et eorum maxima
delicia,'" "the chief delight of kings, and their secret and secure retreat."
Fronted by the sheltered waters of an inland sea, and pierced by the four
wide, beautiful, and commodious estuaries of Christchurch, Lymington,
Beaulieu, and Southampton Water, its heaths, pools, wastes, thickets and
bogs, studded and interlaced with good ground, producing deep and
ancients woods, made it a natural and unrivalled sanctuary for game.

The charge against the Conqueror of " wasting " this district appears

in its most violent form in the pages of Lingard. " Though the king

possessed sixty-eight forests, besides parks and chases, in different parts

of England, he was not satisfied, but for the occasional accommodation of

^ Freeman, Norman Conquest^ Vol. iv. p. 609.

rHE NEW FOREST 7

his court, afforested an extensive tract of country lying between Winchester
and the sea-coast. The inhabitants were expelled ; the cottages and
churches were burnt ; and more than thirty square miles of a rich and
populous district were withdrawn from cultivation and converted into a
wilderness, to afford sufficient range for the deer, and ample space for
the royal diversion." "Many populous towns and villages and thirty-six
parish churches," is the more circumstantial estimate of others, Voltaire
first questioned this tradition on grounds of general historical criticism.
Cobbett easily detected its improbability, from a mere examination of
the soil of the forest. It could never have been a " rich and populous
district " simply because, for the greater part, the soil is among the
poorest in the south of England. Thirty thousand acres were in 1849
reported unfit either for agriculture, the growth of trees, or pasturage.
The test of figures also throws a doubt on the destruction of the villages.
In the original area of the fiDrest there still remain eleven parish
churches on sites where churches were in existence before the time of the
Conqueror. " If he destroyed thirty-six parish churches, what a popu-
lous country this must have been ! " writes Cobbett. " There must have
been forty-seven parish churches ; so that there was over this whole
district, one parish church to every four-and-three-quarter square miles."

The modern inference from these criticisms goes to the extreme
of considering, that in making the forest, William confined himself
to enforcing the forest law within its boundaries, thereby reserving
the exclusive right of sporting for himself, while " men retained
possession of their lands, their woods, mills, or other property, just as
before, save for the stringent regulations of the forest law." ^

Even so the interference with liberty and property, due to this
extraordinary Norman provision for the amusement of the monarch is
almost incredible to modern ideas.

" Forest law " made of the area to which it might at any moment be
applied, a kind of " proclaimed district," where the law of the land at
once ceased to run, and the rights of property only existed under con-
ditions which were mainly^ but not entirely, directed to the preservation
of game. Its excuse was that it was a convenient method of placing wild

1 Arboriculture of the New Forest, by the Hon. G. Lascelles, Deputy Surveyor, New-
Forest.

8 THE NEW FOREST

districts, infested by outlaws, under the strong government of the king,
in place of the timid " presentments " of frightened villagers, and that it
formed a reserve of men and munitions of war for the sovereign. The
assize of the forest of 1184 by Henry II. gives a good notion of the
working of these laws in the New Forest, and a clue to the survivals
which are still there found. No one might sell or give anything from
his own wood, if within the forest, which would destroy it : only fire-
wood {estoverid) was to be taken. The result was that no large timber
could be felled, and this therefore ceased to be private property within
the Crown forests. The king's foresters were to be answerable if this
wood was destroyed. No one was to agist (turn out) his cattle before the
king " agisted " his. The king could agist his fifteen days before
Michaelmas, and closed the woods fifteen days after Michaelmas. No
spring grazing was allowed, so saplings and seedlings had a chance to
grow. Open spaces were to be cut where deer could be shot at, like
the " rides " in our pheasant covers. No tanner or bleacher of skins was
to live in a forest, and " no receivers or thieves."

But the rigour of forest law was mitigated in the days of Henry III.,
the whole of whose charter of the forests is framed against the an-
noyance which the inhabitants had felt from the severity of the
former laws. It provided that every free man should be allowed to
" agist " his own wood in a forest when he pleased, and to have his own
eyries of hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons, eagles and herons. It granted
permission to drive pigs and cattle through the forest, and let them
spend a night on the king's land, with other privileges, which were
probably the origin of many " forest rights " now claimed in the
district. Are we then to conclude that the hardships suffered by the
inhabitants of the " Ytene," the Saxon name of the New Forest, were
limited to such as were incidental to the enforcement of forest laws '^.
Such a consoling answer can scarcely be given. In spite of the inaccuracies
of the form in which it has come down to us, the tradition of the
wasting of this particular forest and the confiscation of land^ are too
unanimous to be disregarded.

^ Freeman quotes an instance of confiscation from Domesday. "The sons of Godric
Ralf hold under the King at Minstrad. Their father had three hides and a half of
land. Now his sons have only half a hide. The rest of the ground is in the forest."

lo THE NEW FOREST

The " stiffness " and cruelty of such a course are too much in
keeping with the character of the king, who turned into a desert
the whole district between the Humber and the Tees. The forest
was perfectly suited by site and soil for William's purpose, and it
is difficult to doubt that in its afforestation hardships were inflicted,
which were remembered long after the general hatred of the Normans
had died away.

But it must not be forgotten that though the rigours of the forest
laws as a means of preserving game relaxed, the protection given by
them to the woods was never withdrawn, and it is to them that we
owe the preservation of the ancient timber until the present day.
When laxly administered, as in the days of Charles I. and the Common-
wealth, the woods have been invariably destroyed ; when enforced, as
by James I. and later in the days of William III. the trees have increased,
and descended to us as one of the finest national inheritances. The
present management of the forest, under an act passed in 1877, is
based on the principle that all, except some 20,000 acres, inclosed since
the year 1700, shall remain open and wild. But in this wild area
forest law still runs, and protects the timber from waste and robbery.

In the Verderers' Hall at Lyndhurst the survivals of forest
law and forest customs appear by the dumb witness of fixed engines
of justice as primitive as the oaks of Brockenhurst. One end
of the bare old chamber is fitted up as a court, in which offenders
against the custom of the forest, wood and fern stealers, or those
who have transgressed the limits within which cattle may be kept,
or other liberties of the forest, are presented by the " agisters," who
play the part of the knights from the hundreds, and townsmen from
the township, who " presented " criminals in the shire moots. " Pre-
sented," the offender certainly is ; for he is exposed to the public
view in the most primitive dock existing in England. The prisoner
sits on a kind of perch, to which he climbs by a step. Behind this
is a square back with cross-pieces of black oak, with the rough axe
marks still showing, and immediately in front, beyond the narrow
interval of the clerk's table is the full bench of verderers. Assuming,
as is probable, that this is a copy of the most ancient arrangement of
such courts, we can imagine how some trembling wretch, with the

12 THE NEW FOREST

prospect of maiming or blinding before him, must have felt before
the scowl of the forest rangers of Norman or Angevin kings, on
this seat of justice over against him. Besides the rude accommodation
for judges and prisoners, the court contains a recess filled with books
on forest law which, by that grace of congruity which seems inseparable
from everything in this strangely perfect region, are screened by the
most appropriate curtain that could be devised, the skin of a red deer.
The walls are decorated by horns of deer, red and fallow. Whatever
the history of the great stirrup, which hangs upon the wall, and is said
to have belonged to William Rufus, it is a notable relic, and thoroughly
in place in this hall of woodland justice. It is clearly the stirrup in
which the thickly-mailed feet of the days of plate armour, with their
broad iron toes were thrust, thick enough and broad enough to give
"support" for the most ponderous horseman in his coat of steel;
and so wide, that the legend that all dogs which could not be
passed through it were considered possible enemies to game, and
therefore maimed does not seem improbable, except in regard to dates.

Lyndhurst is by size and position the true capital of the forest.
There stands the ancient Queen's House, to which the Verderers' Hall
is attached, and in which the Deputy-Surveyor of the Forest has his
residence, and on the high mound of natural verdure in the centre of
the town, the soaring spire of its church shoots up, and dominates the
immense tract of woodland, of which it forms the natural centre.

The town has no mean outskirts, or squalid surroundings. The
woodlands run up to its old houses like a sea ; and the parks surrounding
the fine mansions, which fringe the forest capital, are mere incidents in its
scenery, lost and absorbed in the wild woods around them. Cuf?"nalls
Park, a grassy hill clothed with oaks and beeches, lies just outside the
town, and leads the eye by an easy transition, from the formal gardens of
the Lyndhurst houses, to the uncovenanted graces of the natural forest.
Beyond the park the road divides to Burley and Christchurch on the
left, to Ringwood on the right, and at the parting of the ways,
the forest at once and without reserve flings itself across the field
of sight. Thence to Mark Ash, the most renowned of all the ancient
woods, the way lies through scenes in an ascending scale of beauty which
mark this as the first path to be trodden by the pilgrim and stranger.

THE NEW FOREST

13

The understanding needs time to eddy round the crowding forms that
claim its homage. It is the Eleusinian Way, along which the genius of the
forest seems to lead the neophyte gently by the hand, saying, " Look on
this, and that, and that, first grasp the lesser, then the greater mysteries,
until with eyes and understanding opened you may enter and enjoy the
earthly paradise of perfect beauty which lies beyond."

Thus the mind keeps its sense of proportion, and the excitement and

Cottage at L'^ndhurst.

Stimulus of this appeal to the sense of admiration is maintained, as the
appetite grows with the beauty which feeds it. Slow and lingering should
be the tread, silent and solitary the traveller, in a first journey
to the high places of the forest, assured that, though the first steps are
through the scenes of laughing rustic prettiness, by lawns and groves,
the playgrounds of the forest children, and pastures of the forest cattle,
ground that in other times would have been sacred to Faunus and Pan,
and all their merry crew, he will at last pass beyond the ways of men,
and find himself face to face with masterpieces of Nature's hand, before
which he must stand silent and amazed.

14 THE NEW FOREST

From CufFnalls Park two winding roads lead up the steep ascent
on either hand. In the space between, sloping gently upwards towards
the light is neither field nor fence, but against the sky-line is ranged
a crescent of oaks and beeches, fronted by most ancient thorns.
Three shapes, three colours distinguish tree from tree, through their
centre a green glade winds up into the wood, and from their feet
a smooth lawn of turf flows gently down into the point at which
the roads divide, watched on either hand by a sentinel oak.

" Swan Green " is the name of this beautiful lawn. Beyond its
slope lies the village of Emery Down, after which the signs and
sounds of human habitation disappear with a suddenness almost startling.
The road lies through rolling tracts of the most wild and ancient forest
land. Right and left the slopes are clothed with trees in the prime and
vigour of their age. Some few are oaks ; but the beech is the indigen-
ous, or perhaps the growing tree of this stately tract of forest, and from
this point onwards the mind is incessantly invited to consider the manifold
beauties of form which even one species of forest tree presents.

There seems no limit to the hall of columns which fades away into
dim distance in the wood, though the space between the stem is clear
and open. The gray trunks shoot straight upwards to the sky each with
its smooth surrounding lawn. The tallest beeches which spring on the
slope of the hill-sides seem to draw back with a certain reticence from
the broad pathways of the glades, drooping their branches downward and
wrapping them round their feet with a dainty and almost feminine dignity
and reserve. Others grow like oaks, flinging their branches abroad in
wild disordered tangles.

There are those among them which have already passed their prime,
and yet scarcely show the symptoms of decay. In many beeches the
first years of decline add dignity to their forms. The tree dies from the
top ; but at first this appears only by a cessation of upward growth.
The branches at the summit thicken, cluster, and multiply, like the
antlers on an old stag's horns, giving to the whole massive and weighty
proportions in strange contrast to the usual graceful and feathery outlines
of its race. In others, further advanced in the stages of decay, the
vigour of the lower branches so arrests the eye, that it scarcely travels
beyond the mass of leafage, though above and from the centre of the

THE NEW FOREST

15

healthy boughs an upright growth of bare gray limbs rises grimly naked
and alone.

Some two miles from Lyndhurst the hush of the forest begins. If
the wind is still, and the trees motionless, there is a silence which can be
felt. In winter or early spring, before the summer migrants have arrived,
or the hum of insects has begun to stir the air, the sense of hearing is
not excited by any form of sound. There are neither men nor children

J Dead Giant, Mark Ask.

in this part of the wood, the cattle are away on distant lawns, the deer
are hidden in the thick inclosures, and the great birds which haunt the
forest are away, in the still grander and more solemn precincts of
the most ancient woods. Beyond Emery Down the high wood gives
place to a rolling natural park, clothed with heather, cotton grass, and
gray whortle bushes, and studded with single trees, or small groups, in
pairs and triplets, of perfect form. Here is seen that phase of beauty so
often desired and seldom found, distance in the forest, bounded only by

i6 "THE NEW FOREST

a far-ofF misty screen of luxuriant wood. Beyond this open park, the
imagination is kept in constant excitement and expectation by the
increasing size and beauty of the trees. Each group seems to surpass
the Jast, and to mark the ultimate limits of grace and size, until some-
thing even grander and more stately takes the pride of place. Their
splendour dominates the mind to the exclusion of all other subjects of
thought. You become a connoisseur not only in their general beauty
but in its particular forms. You analyse them into types, grades, and
permanent varieties, and no longer compare them promiscuously, but
form standards for the different classes. Some of the finest ancient
beeches have apparently been pollarded, and so far from this proving a
disfigurement in their ripe maturity, it gives them a variety of form
and a spread of limb, which makes a fine contrast with the towering
domes which top the single stems of the natural tree. Many of the
pollards seem to come late into leaf, and the effect is particularly fine
when in spring their ruddy buds surround some other forest giant in
the full glory of early growth.

On the left side of the road, some two and a half miles beyond Emery
Down, there is such a group of immense spreading pollards, above which
towers the rounded head of an unshrouded tree, capped with a cloud of
vivid green floating leaf-buds.

Opposite the beech circle, a low line of alders gives promise of a
swamp, and the ground descends into a "bottom"; not the squashy
river of grass usually known by that name in the Surrey coombes, but
a flat swampy valley of gray and lichen-covered heather and cotton-
grass, scored and intersected by the manifold windings of a slow,
dark stream, curling round masses of cattle-gnawed and ivy-strangled
alders and sallows, heaped and encumbered with soft mounds of black
and gray mud, studded with little bulbous oak stems, stunted and
decayed, and shattered by the lightning of the thunder clouds which
follow the water. The struggle for life against water and lightning
must also be made heavier by the force of the wind in this valley of
desolation, for even the tough alders had been uprooted by the gales,
and lay prostrate in the marsh, with cavernous hollows beneath their
roots haunted by water-rats and tiny trout. In the most stagnant parts
white limbs of drowned oaks raise their skeleton arms above the marsh.

THE NEW FOREST 17

and the ragged ponies which graze round the margin, test carefully at
each step the ground in which so many of their companions have sunk
and perished when weak with winter and famine.

The colouring of this swampy hollow is in complete contrast to the
brilliant tints of the sound lawns and high woods. It has only two tones,
gray and black. Yet even there the finishing touch of nature completes
the picture. The black stream and alder clumps are fringed and studded
with golden marsh marigolds, and over the gray mud creeps an exquisite
little plant with five-lobed leaves and gray starry flowers like silver stone-
crop. A low ridge of better soil divides this slow rivulet of the swamp
from the bright waters of a typical New Forest stream, the Lymington
river. On its banks the solemn beeches once more cluster, and the
hurrying stream goes dancing through the wood golden clear with topaz
lights, past the lines of columned trees, slipping from pool to pool with
little impatient rushes, resting a moment in the deeper pools, then climb-
ing the pebble beds which bar them in, and hurrying down to the sea,
at Lymington Haven.

This river, like that at Beaulieu, belongs wholly to the forest.
Here it is a mere brook, with exquisitely rounded banks of turf and
moss, as if the wood fairies who put the acorn and beech nuts to bed
for the winter had tucked in the coverlet on either side and then
embroidered it with flowers. The pools are full of enormous "boatmen"
which lurk under the banks and dart out at every leaf, insect or
stick which comes floating down the stream. Each morsel is seized,
pulled about and examined by the creatures, like a company of
custom-house officers at a port, and as a steady rain of debris from the
trees descends upon the stream throughout the day they are kept busy
from dawn till dusk. Even so near its source this stream sometimes
overflows its banks. In one spot the whole of the surface roots of a
beech have been pared clear of soil as if by a trowel. It is not a large
tree, but the spread of root is fifteen paces across.

West of the river the ancient trees once more close in towards the
road, and beyond them on either side are younger woods planted by the
Crown. Very few young trees appear in this part of the old forest, but
on the right hand of the path is a beautiful example of tree protecting
tree from the destroying cattle. A most ancient crab-tree, hoary with

B

1 8 THE NEW FOREST

lichen and green with ivy, has thrown its protecting arms round the stem
of a fine young oak. The smooth clean stem now shoots up clear of the
old crabtree, whose delicate pink blossom mixed with the black ivy
berries, shows that it is vigorous still in spite of its double burden of
carrying the ivy and caring for the oak.

An example of the astonishing detail and completeness of the natural
beauties of the forest, beauty presented on a scale so large, that the
absence of detail and ornament might well pass unobserved, may be
seen round the stem of every great tree that fronts the road. Take for
instance the base of the beech column which stands opposite to the grass
track that leads to the left to the charcoal burner's hut below Mark Ash.
It is the base of a compound column, thicker than the piers of Durham
Cathedral, with seven projecting pilasters. The bark is like gray frosted
silver, crusted in parts with a scale ornament of lichen, and in the
interstices between the pillars with short golden-brown moss. The
rounded niches which encircle its base are laid out as natural gardens ;
which in April of the present year were planted and arranged as follows.
In one a violet bed, covered with blossoms which touched the bark of
the trunk. In the next a briar-rose, a foot high in young leaf. In the
third three curling fronds of bracken fern. In the fourth a moss-grown
billet of sere wood, and a pile of last year's beech mast. In the fifth a
young woodbine, which had slipped into the inmost crevice between
the sheltering pilasters, and was already adorned with little whorls of
green leaves. In the sixth a wood sorrel, with trefoils of exquisite green-
like chrysoprase, and in the seventh niche four seedling hollies, a tiny
rowan tree, and a seedling beech as high as a pencil. The whole was
encircled by a close carpet of moss turf, and the tUhris of leaves. The
eye sees these minor beauties in series and succession ; but no mere
catalogue can convey an adequate idea of the delight and satisfaction
afforded to the mind by this prodigal abundance of natural ornament.

The cries of the woodland birds, which hitherto had hardly broken the
silence of the forest, showed that the attractions of cover, food, and water
must be combined in a measure not yet encountered in the adjacent
glades. The bright sun poured between the green leaves and reached the
dark hollows among the pines below, and the wood rang with the cries of
the larger and rarer birds which have here their haunt. The hooting and

THE NEW FOREST

19

yelping of the owls, though it was noon-day, was almost like the inter-
mittent cry of hounds that have strayed from the pack, and are hunting
some solitary deer. The laughing of the woodpecker, the harsh and
angry screams of the jays, the crow of the cock pheasant, and the cuckoo's
call, showed that animal life, hitherto so scarce in this wealth of arboreal
growth was here abundant and in evidence. The only trace of man's
presence was the rudest and most primitive dwelling known to civilized

Charcoal Burner's Hut, Bolderzvood.

life. In the centre of a clearing, surrounded on three sides by a towering
ring of monster beeches, was a deserted charcoal burner's hut, with the
"burning circle" in front of the door. Except for the setting of good
English trees it might pass for part of the kraal of some race of wood-
land dwarfs, with its " zeriba " in front. The last is a large circle of
brushwood, supported by posts and rails of rough oak-poles. Within
was a flooring of black ashes, neatly raked into a raised ring at a few feet
from the circumference.

B 2

20 THE NEW FOREST

The hut looks like a white ants' hill covered with scales of turf
turned grass inwards, with a kind of mushroom cup on the apex. The
only sign that the dwelling was not constructed by savages is the square
door and porch, hewn of roughly squared oak. A glimpse of the interior
shows that the framework is a cope of strong oak poles, and the only
furniture a couple of sacks of dry beech leaves, a low wooden bench, and
one or two iron pots. A similar hut in Gritnam wood is inhabited
throughout the year by an adder-hunter. He does not even indulge in
the luxury of a beech leaf mattress or a wooden door ; but lives in health
and comfort with a low oak bench for his bed, and a faggot of heather
for curtain and door.

A narrow glen and stream, with an ascent bare of trees forms a kind
of precinct, before the last and inmost circle of the wood, where the
neophyte may pause, and see revealed before him, the final and crowning
secret of the forest. The voices of Dodona's doves echo softly throbbing
from the grove, and invite him " to touch, to see, to enter " and be from
henceforth one of the initiated. On either side the enormous beeches rise,
some tossing their branches like the arms of Blake's angels, sweeping sky-
ward with uplifted hands, others with huge limbs flung supine on the
turf, others like slender pillars from which spring fretted vaults and
arches, trees male and female, trees of architecture, and trees of life, rising
in measured order and gradual succession on the sides of a theatre of
woodland turf. Where the solemn aisles diverge they are walled with
holly, roofed with the green of the beech, and floored with flesh colour
and gold, as the broken lights glitter on the carpet of moss and wind-
sown leaves. Half of a clustered beech had fallen in one shock to the
ground, smashing into ruin the tall hollies below it, and scattering their
broken limbs m a yet wider circle of destruction. The scent of beech
and holly from the crushed and broken fragments overpowered all the
odours of the forest. Deer had been browsing on the fallen boughs, and
three fallow bucks sprang up from behind the ruin and rushed through
the hollies beyond. Nine fallen limbs, each a tree itself in size and
proportions, lay spread upon the ground like the fingers of a fan. The
coating of moss with which it was completely covered made it easy to
walk up over the limbs to the point of fracture and thence look down
into the forest. In front lay beds of young holly glittering in the sun, the

THE NEW FOREST 21

ground between them covered with the vivid green of wood-sorrel.
Beyond, and around, on every side the towering forms of the gigantic
tree? stand clear, each behind each in ordered ranks without movement
or sound in the still air, except for the cooing of the ring-doves and the
screams of the wood-owls moving in the forest. It is a temple without
walls, with a thousand pillars and a thousand gates, aisles innumerable
and arches multiplex, so lofty, so light, so ancient and so fair that it seems
the work not of natural growth but of some enchantment, which has
raised it in the forest far from the home of man, unpeopled, untrodden
and alone.

Such is the ancient wood of Mark Ash, in itself, its setting and
surroundings. It may be doubted whether elsewhere in England is to be
found another to excel it or equal it in the completeness of its beauty,
and in the strange perfection of the growth, not only of its trees, but of
its turf, its flowers and its lawns, to which the will of man has not
contributed the laying of a sod or the setting of a daisy.

CHAPTER II

THE CENTRAL FOREST {continued)

The forest heaths — Beaulieu a?id Ober Heath contrasted — Fleming's th:orns — Matiey Heath
and Bog —Flight of the woodcocks at dusk up Matley Passage — • Denn"^ Bog by tzcilight —
Alum Green and the Roman Arch — The Knightwood oak — Heronry in Finney Ridge —
Toung herons ; buzzards ; the adder-hunter- — Brockenhurst — Night in the forest.

The sense of freedom and limitless distance which always accompanies
a forest walk is never more complete than when the traveller emerges
from roaming in the great woods or thick plantations and finds himself
on one of the wide heaths which stretch for miles beside the woodlands,
and are themselves surrounded by distant lines of forest beyond which
lie heaths, and yet more forest far away down to the shores of the Solent.
Beaulieu Heath is perhaps the finest of the open stretches of forest
scenery. There is something so new, fresh and exhilarating in the sudden
presentation of this apparently unlimited stretch of high open level
ground, swept by the volume of the over-sea wind that comes rolling up
from the Channel, which reacts on the mind with a kind of intoxication
of space and air. Miles of whispering pines are the background to the heath :
beyond all is open, level and free, the ground falling imperceptibly till the
near horizon is nothing but a level line of heather, below which the inter-
secting waters of the Solent are lost to sight, though the blue hills of the
Isle of Wight rise like the background of a panorama, far beyond the
invisible strait which lies between. There are those who prefer the forest
heaths even to the forest woods. Doubtless each gains by contrast, the
more so that the change from the high woods to the sweeping moorland,
is often as sudden as the shifting of a scene upon the stage.

Take for instance the wide stretch of Ober Heath, which fringes the

SOT ,i»>.| .("PiV-

THE NEW FOREST 23

great plantations of Rhinefield Walk, and runs almost down to
Brockenhurst from the modern castle which has been built upon the site
of the keeper's lodge at Rhinefield. The upper portion of the heath is
like a scene in the Surrey pine districts, studded with self-sown Scotch
fir, and clothed with gorse bushes, rough heather, and a tiny dwarf
willow, which creeps upon the ground like ivy, but otherwise is a perfect
willow bush, studded in spring with tiny satin globes, like the " palms " of
the common osier, but no larger than shot or tare-seed. Far away across
the dark purple heather and golden gorse, the quick stream of Ober-water
runs through a flat green lawn to join the Brockenhurst river just above
New Park, with the hill of Brockenhurst Manor breaking the sky-line
to the right. The left side of the heath is fringed by heavy forest ; but
in this case the transition from heath to wood is broken by a wide scrub
of dwarf thorns, round as beehives, matted with heather, and knots
and beards of lichen. Some hundred acres must be covered by
" Fleming's thorns," as this dense thicket is called. Those who have
seen both, compare it to the mimosa scrub of the African plains.
Like the mimosa it is a favourite haunt of game ; and the wild deer
love to lie in its secluded and impenetrable jungle.

No fence or boundary marks the transition from heath to forest.
The river slips from the common, between clumps of holly and single
waving birches, winds down a glade, and in a few yards is lost to sight
among masses of oak, alder, ash, and pines. Looking backwards towards
the sunset along this borderland, the rugged outlines of the gorse and fir,
and the broken and wind-swept hollies and thorns which fringe the full
fed forest, give to the scene an air of wildness and confusion in striking
contrast to the serene tranquillity which reigns within the solemn precints
of the woods. Ober Heath is an example of the forest moor inclosed by
wooded hills. On Matley Heath, south of Lyndhurst, the converse may
be seen ; a barren heather-clad hill rising steadily from low wooded ground
on either side, and then descending in a long and gentle slope to an immense
expanse of flat and barren moor. This wild and desolate tract is perhaps
the largest unbroken stretch of heather and infertility in the whole forest.
Under the names of Matley Heath, Black Down, Yew-tree Heath, and
Denny Bog, it stretches east of Lyndhurst in a straight line of five miles
to the Beaulieu river. Cobbett, who rode across it after having missed

24 THE NEW FOREST

his way, and hated heaths because they would not grow his pet swede
turnips, calls it " about six miles of heath even worse than Bagshot
Heath ; as barren as it is possible for land to be." From Lyndhurst the
road gradually ascends, the soil all the way growing thinner and poorer,
until the bare gravel shows in white patches and plains among the starved
heather. Yet on the right, and at no great distance are thick woods of
the finest timber in England, and even on the crest of the hill, a fine
rounded wood of beech and oak, Matley Wood, stands up like a fertile
island, with a sea of heather and bog round it. To the left lies the great
stretch of Matley Bog, and to the right a narrow strip of hard sand where
the road creeps round the head of the morass. Here is a picture which,
but for the road and bridge cannot have changed for a thousand years.
A stream flows down from a wide valley in the thick woods, and spreads
itself among green marshes, sedge, and alder copses, at the top of the bog,
whose level and impassable plain loses itself in the black heath which
stretches far beyond the railway into the southern forest. At dusk,
the woodcocks, which rest in the forest, come flying up from the bog to
the woods. On the last day of April of the present year, at a quarter
before eight, the woodcocks were already on the wing. Night was set-
tling down on the heath, but the horizon was still light above the hill,
and tall clouds were passing across the west. A sound came from
the bog, like the twittering of swallows on the wing, mixed with low
croaking cries. Then a bird with steady flight like that of a curlew
on the mud-flats came up out of the dusk, and crossed the road, uttering
its curious call at regular intervals, and making straight for the head of
the woodland glen. This was followed by a pair, which, after crossing
the road flew tilting at one another, and turning and twisting in the air
all round the semi-circle of lofty trees which crown the hollow in the
woods. Bird after bird then flew up from the bog, until the forest glen
was full of their dusky forms twisting and twining, like swallows or fern
owls, against the evening sky.

Next day a young woodcock was brought into Lyndhurst ; it had
been caught in the wood close to the Lyndhurst race-course, the rest
of the brood were seen hiding close by, with their heads laid upon the
ground and bodies motionless like young plover, while the parent
bird flew round, and endeavoured to decoy the lad who found them

^

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26 "THE NEW FOREST

from the spot. This young bird was a most beautiful creature, no
longer covered with down, but fully fledged to all ^appearance, and
adorned with the beautiful brown mottling which makes the wood-
cock's plumage one of the most perfect pieces of tone-ornament in
nature. As the night creeps on, blurring every minor feature of the
scene, and leaving only the faint gleam of waters and the black forms of
the alder clumps from distance to distance in the bog, the cry of the
wild-fowl, echoed by the dark wall of forest at the back, shows that
all the natives of the marsh are awake and moving. The croak of the
woodcocks, the calling and screaming of the plovers, the bleating of the
snipe, and the harsh barking of the herons, winging their way from
Vinney Ridge to the Beaulieu river, fill the air with sound, though the
creatures themselves are invisible; while from the forest the yelping and
screeching of the owls, the incessant drone of the " churr worms," and the
whirr of the great wood-beetles, answers the calls from the open moor.
At such times the stranger will do well to seek the road and return
across the heath ; for once entangled in the great woods which lie
southward of the marsh, he may well be lost till morning. In the angle
between this mass of forest and the railway, lies Denny Bog, a more
distant and even more picturesque portion of this irreclaimable waste.
The words bog, marsh and swamp are often used indifferently. Properly
understood they apply to widely difl^erent conditions.

A bog is a portion of ground lying in soak. In the forest they are
found of all sizes, from the area of a dining-room table to that of Hyde
Park. The rim of the bog is hard enough to prevent the escape of
the water except by gradual soakage, and thus the service is level. Yet
the beauty of the bogs is known and appreciated by every " forester,"
though they are a fruitful source of disaster to riders who do not
know how they often lurk under the very shadow of the timber at
the edge of the sound land of the woods. There is a tiny bog on the
edge of Gritnam Wood which may serve as an example. On the verge
of the common which lies below the wood is a pretty little circle of
golden moss, with patches of green grass, and pools of black water no
larger than a man's hand. Towards the centre the colouring is as bril-
liant as that of sea- weeds and sea-anemones seen in sunlit water. The
mosses grow into spongv pillows, with exquisite feathery fronds. Some

THE NEW FOREST 27

of this moss is rose-pink ; other kinds brilliant green, or tawny brown,
and from the whole comes a scent like that of fern roots. A man may
walk across in safety, but a horse breaks through the spongy surface, and
nearly always falls, throwing its rider in the process, for the sucking
mosses prevent any effort at recovering its footing after the first stumble.

Herons, like the monks of old, seem always to choose a picturesque
site for their home. Their home in the wooded hills of Wytham, look-
ing far far across the flats of the upper Thames valley, or in the tall
pines of Woolmer Forest, near the Deer's Hut common, in the steep
cliffs of the Findhorn river, and last, but not least beautiful, the heronry
in the thick plantation at the head of the Penn Ponds in Richmond Park,
where the London herons build almost unknown to the thousands of
visitors who skate upon the lakes in winter, or ride and drive past them
in summer, are each the chosen spots in their own beautiful vicinity.
The heronry on Vinney Ridge, about four miles from Lyndhurst, is no
exception to the rule, and the path to it leads through some of the
finest woodland scenery. Part lies along an ancient Roman road,
which runs over the summit of Lyndhurst Hill.

From this the view ranges far to south, west, and east, while at its
foot lies Alum Green, perhaps the largest and most beautiful of all the
forest lawns. It is a kind of natural " savannah " in the woods. The
extent of sound turf covers many acres, dotted with park-like groups of
trees, surrounded on all sides with a ring of ancient timber on sloping
banks. It is the favourite resort of all the ponies and cattle in this
part of the Forest. The ancient path joins the main road to Christchurch,
near the Lymington stream, about a mile below the bridge which crosses
it on the way to Mark Ash. Here also is a bridge, of a single arch of
brick. The stream comes hurrying down to this through the open
forest. Three tributaries have already swelled its waters between this
and the upper crossing-place, and river and banks alike are deeper and
even lovelier than before. The broken banks are planted, wreathed, and
fringed by every kind of forest flower, shrub, and fern, of the largest
and most luxuriant growth. Anemones, cuckoo-flowers, violets, king-
cups, young bracken, and hard-fern, woodbine and wild rose, heart's-
tongue, and moss like lengths of velvet cover the banks, the beech-
boughs arch the stream, and on each side the open wood extends to the

28 rHE NEW FOREST

utmost limit of sight. The otters make this part of the river their
summer home. Two young ones were recently dug out from the earth
a short way below the " Gate House," which stands near the bridge, and
during the day they frequently lie up, either in the dry forest near, or
under the roots of a big tree by the banks. The habits of the New
Forest otters on this stream seem very well known to those who are
interested either in hunting or observing them. They travel a long way
down the river at night, perhaps past Brockenhurst and as far as
Boldre, or even below to near Lymington. They then hunt the stream
upwards in the early morning until they reach the narrow waters, where
they stay during the day. The pack of otter-hounds, which generally
visits the forest in the early summer, usually meet at Brockenhurst or
some other point down stream and pick up the fresh " drag " of the
otters, which have returned up stream in the early hours of the morning.
Hunted deer also make for the water at this point, and endeavour to
throw off the pack before seeking refuge in the thick recesses of Knight-
wood and Vinney Ridge. A fallow buck finds the dimensions of the
stream quite adequate for the temporary destruction of scent. Slipping
down some tributary brooklet it will pick its way down to a pool, and
then, gently sinking, until nothing but head and horns remain above
water, lies as motionless as a squatted hare listening to the shouts, talk-
ing, casting, and excitement on either bank, until refreshed and invigor-
ated it springs once more to the bank and leads its pursuers another
circle through the woods and bogs of the forest.

North of the road, a little beyond the " Roman Arch," as tradition
calls this bridge, is the inclosure of Knight wood. This large wood,
though in part replanted in 1867, contains many remnants of ancient
forest embedded in the new timber, among other the celebrated Knight-
wood Oak. Thus it shows in juxtaposition both the artificial and
natural modes of reproducing forest. On the edges of the wood are
close plantations of Scotch fir, in formal rows, which shelter and direct
the upward growth of the young oaks between. In the centre, where
old trees have died and been removed, or have in past time cleared a
space which their present height leaves free to light and air, young oaks,
birches, and beeches are growing in irregular masses and of all heights
and sizes. Among this confused multitude is the great Knightwood Oak

K?iightzvood Oak, Mark Ash.

30 THE NEW FOREST

This forest king stands in a smooth round lawn, all other trees keep-
ing their distance beyond the outermost circle of its branches. The
main trunk of the oak rises like a smooth round Norman pillar, and at
no great height breaks into eight limbs which radiate from it like the
sticks of a fan, in very straight and regular lines. The extremities of
these show signs of decay, but the tree seems as firm as ever. Its rigidity
is such that in a heavy gale, though the tops of the branches move, the
mass of the tree seems as stiff as if cast in iron. The limbs, though
untouched by decay, are coated nearly to the summit by thick green
moss, and the effect of this symmetrical mass of timber springing from a
trunk of such magnitude — its girth is 19^ feet — is beyond description
dignified and imposing. The tallest beeches in the forest are probably
those in which the herons build in the Vinney Ridge inclosure, on the
opposite side of the Christ Church Road from Knightwood. The wood
lies on the top of a fine saddle-back hill, covered with trees of every
kind, except elm, and of all ages, from old ivy-bound oaks to immense
beeches and thorn-bushes wreathed with woodbine. There is a far
greater extent of open turf here than in most " inclosures," and when
the fences are removed in 1899, which is the date fixed for its
disenclosure, it will take its place as a natural part of the ancient
forest.

The beeches in which the herons build are so lofty as to lift their
summits above the natural angle of sight, even as the head is
usually carried in the forest ; if it were not for the glimpses of the
great birds silently launching themselves from the tree-tops before
their disturber has approached the nest, the existence of the colony would
not be suspected. It was the flight of a single heron slipping noiselessly
from the nest, and soaring back in a wide circle to watch over the brood,
that first indicated to the present writer that he was in the heronry.
Even then the height of the trees, their distance apart, and the thickness
of the foliage at the top made the discovery of the nest no easy task,
had not the clattering noise made by the young indicated their where-
abouts. The presence of birds of prey, though usually screened from
sight by the thickness of the forest, was well illustrated by an incident
which took place after the momentary flight of the old herons. A
sparrow-hawk dashed up through the wood, and poising itself above the

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32 rHE NEW FOREST

trees, flew from nest to nest, looking down into them from a height of a
few feet, and apparently expecting to find a brood small enough for one
to be carried off before the old birds returned. The hawk's visit only
lasted for a minute, for at that moment five old herons came sweeping
over the wood, and remained soaring in hurried and anxious flight far
above the tops of the loftiest trees. When we retired to some distance
and stood still by a timber stack, bird after bird pitched on the trees, and
after one or two subdued croaks of greeting, flapped down into the nest.
The eyries appear absolutely inaccessible, built, as they are, at heights of
from seventy to ninety feet from the ground on trees which rise two-
thirds of that height without a single branch. Yet they are climbed,
otherwise the inquiry as to whether you " could do with some young
herons " — or young " cranes," for both names are used in the forest —
would not be addressed to those who are known to have a taste for
keeping odd pets so often as it is.

There are a few ancient inhabitants who still know the favourite
nesting places, not only of the herons, but of rarer birds, such as
the common and honey-buzzard. The forest is said to be the last
breeding place of the honey-buzzard left in England, and there is no
reason, in the present condition of the woodlands, why either of these
birds should forsake the district, except in the prices offered for their
eggs by "oologists." The keepers protect a nest when found, and as the
honey-buzzard does not lay till summer is well advanced, there is more
chance of its nest escaping observation than for those of the early-
building birds.

The strangest survival of any industry connected with the taking of
wild animals in the forest is that of the " Adder-hunter," probably the
very last representative in England of a race who for upwards of two
centuries have contributed their strange nostrum of adder's fat to the
pharmacopoeias of central and western Europe. The last of the Adder-
hunters is a strikingly handsome man, probably past his sixtieth year, short,
with curling beard and hair, and equipped in what is probably a unique
costume for his peculiar trade. Thick boots and gaiters protect him
from the chance of a bite from the snakes. He is slung all over with
bags of sacking, his pockets are stuffed with tins and boxes, and from his
chest hangs a pair of long steel forceps. In his hand he carries a light

rHE NEW FOREST

zz

stick with a ferrule, into which when he rouses a snake he puts in a
short forked piece of hazel wood, and, darting it forward with unerring

The Adder-Catcker.

aim, pins the adder to the ground. Stooping down he picks it up lightly
with the forceps, and after holding the writhing creature up for a
moment, in which he looks like a rustic ^sculapius, he transfers it to his

c

34 I'HE NEW FOREST

sack, Mr. Mills, or " Brusher," as he is known among his friends, is a well-
known and popular character in the forest, and his services in keeping
down the number of adders are considerable. From March to September
he ranges the forest, and his largest "bag" was i6o adders in a month.
These he boils down, and prepares from their flesh the " adder's fat,"
which he sells. Its virtues have been known for so many centuries, and
the favour with which extremely penetrating unguents, such as lanoline,
made from the fat of sheep's wool, are now regarded, justifies the reputa-
tion it enjoys. The belief that it is a remedy for the bite of the snake
itself may rest on slender grounds. But for the odd list of accidents
given by the old man — " sprains, black eyes, poisoning with brass, bites
by rats and horses, rheumatic joints, and sore feet in men and dogs," it
is admitted by the general consent of the forest to be a sovereign balm.
In winter the Adder-hunter's occupation is gone, but he has other modes
of making a livelihood, and his lodging throughout the year is in the
woods, in the snug interior of a charcoal-burner's hut.

Brockenhurst, unlike Lyndhurst, which, with all its picturesque
features, bears itself like a little town, is a true village, imbedded in
the forest. Here the ground is stiff clayey loam, suitable for the
growth of oaks, and consequently for corn and arable land. The
square fields, with hedgerows, which fringe the village give an uneasy
sense of limit and confinement after the free and open woodlands.
But the cultivated land is a mere patch, lost to sight and memory
in a few minutes' walk from the village. The church stands apart
on a little hill, a perfect forest shrine, ringed by a double circle of
oaks, between which lie the graves, sprinkled with primroses that have
crept out from the wood, and spread their flowers shyly on the church-
yard turf. Like the new church of Lyndhurst, the building stands upon
a green mount, A giant yew, sound and vigorous, with a solid stem
eighteen feet in girth, overshadows the red-brick tower, and reaches
halfway up the spire. In front of this tree stand the dead fragments
of an oak. The age of this ruin of a tree is almost beyond conjecture,
but its position gives some clue to its date. Part of one branch survives.
This limb, which appears to be some six feet in diameter, must have
passed across the space on which the greater part of the yew now stands,
at a height of thirteen feet from the ground. Thus when the ancient

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36

THE NEIV FOREST

yew was a mere shrub, not so high as the great limb of the oak, the latter
must have attained its full dimensions ; for the yew is a tree of perfect
growth, straight, upright, and unmarred by crowding or shade, which
must have been the case had it grown up when the oak-bough was large
enough to overshadow it. The shell of the oak measures twenty-five feet

\

Bridge near Brockenhnrst.

round ; and the centuries of the growth of the yew must be the measure
of the decline and fall of this primeval oak.

At dusk, when the heavy clouds descend and brood in long lines
across the woods, with bars of pale white sky below, the scene between
Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst is singularly wild and pleasing. The white
and waning light in the west is broken by the sharp outlines of the
rugged firs, and reflected in pale sheets in the swampy pools which
line the river. The woods are studded with clumps of holly, whose

THE NEW FOREST 37

opaque black outline contrasts with the gnarled and twisted limbs of
the ancient pollarded oaks native to this stiff and vigorous soil. As
the dusk creeps on the night-sounds of the forest are more distinctly
heard. The splashing of the ponies' feet as they crop the grass of the
swamps, the neighing of the forest mares as they call their foals, and the
distant tinkle of the cattle-bells, sound through the trees, and shadowy
forms of deer canter across the rides. Voices of children, calling or
crying in the deep wood, are among the startling and unexpected sounds
of night in the forest. More than once the writer has left the track and
hastened into the grove, only to see the fire of a gipsy camp, with
the children and parents lying at the mouth of their tent, lighted and
warmed by the glow of their beech-wood fire. The smell of the woods
on a still night, when dew is falling, is the essence of a thousand years
distilling in the soil of this virgin forest. It baffles description ; suffice
it to say, as Herodotus did of Arabia Felix, " from this country comes
an odour, wondrous sweet." Nor are true perfumes wanting, where
wafts of the scent of sweetbriar come across the path, or an unseen bed
of hyacinths fringes the road.

CHAPTER III

THE WILD DEER AND FOREST PONIES

Unique character of hujit'mg i?i the '■'■High Woods'''' — Survival of the zvild deer — A spring
meet at New Parlc — Rousing deer zvith tufters — Old Moonstone — Laying on the
pack — Full cry in the forest — Number of deer killed — -The forest ponies — Their
importance to the Commoners — Arab blood — Their feral habits — Improvefnent and
fnaintenance of the breed — The Pony Shozv at Lyndhurst.

The forest was created as a hunting-ground, and such it still
remains. The fox is regularly hunted, and the otter-hounds visit
Brockenhurst in spring. But the beasts of the chase peculiar to the
district are the wild red and fallow deer, which are hunted amid
settings and surroundings absolutely unique in England.

Their continued existence is one instance in many of the natural
survival of what is appropriate to the forest. When the deer were
over-preserved by the Crown, their presence led to endless ill-will and
demoralisation. From 7,000 to 8,000 head are said to have lived
within and about the boundaries of the forest at the end of the last
century. Such a stock was far larger than the natural resources of the
ground could maintain. In the winter they were partly fed by hay
grown for them at New Park, Even so they frequently starved in
hard weather, and it is said that in the winter of 1787 three hundred
were found dead in one walk. The reaction from this over-preservation
went almost as far in the opposite direction. The " Deer Removal Act "
M'as passed in 1851. The greater number were taken in the "toils"
— high nets still kept in most deer parks — and most of the rest were
shot down by sportsmen. But they have survived all efforts at their

THE NEW FOREST 39

destruction, and their increase in the thick and quiet plantations is now
steadily maintained.

Towards the close of the season, late in April, a day with the New
Forest deerhounds presents from meet to finish a series of pictures of
sylvan sport, in the full glory of the English spring, each of which might
be illustrated from the plays of Shakespeare and the old ballad poetry of
England. Take for example the scene at a meet late in April of the
present year, under the tall oaks at New Park. Three men, born and
bred in the forest, sons of woodmen, dressed in brown velveteen, tlT,ick
boots, and gaiters, were leaning against the oaks. Each wore across his
shoulders long thongs of leather, with loops and swivels of steel, working
examples of those mysterious ornaments of white and gold with which
the Master of the Oueen's Buckhounds is girded as he leads the royal
procession on the Cup day at Ascot. These are the " couples," for
holding the pack, until the time comes to lay them on upon the scent of
the deer, which the " tufters " have driven from cover. Three or four
red-scarved, black-muzzled forest gipsies strolled up and formed a group
under another oak, little dark active laughing orientals, a strange contrast
to the sturdy foresters. The old adder-catcher next joined the party ; he
had hunted the forest as he came, and flung down upon the ground from
his wallet a pair of writhing snakes. The " kennels " are good customers
for his adder's fat, as it is believed not only to be useful to reduce sprains
and injuries in horse and hound, but also as a remedy against the adder
poison should a hound be bitten in the forest. A gipsy family followed,
ragged, unkempt, " happy as birds and hard as nails," as a forester described
them, taking the meet on their most leisurely way to Brockenhurst. An
old woman, the present patriarch of the forest gipsies, led the way, in a
cloak of enormous squares ot scarlet and black, which covered the basket
she carried like a tent, and a poke-bonnet. Another younger woman, in
a true " witches' hat " with elf locks hanging from below, and a tribe of
most ragged children, sockless, shoeless, some pushing a little cart in
which lay their tents, others straying and returning like little wild
animals, were amusing themselves by imitating a pack of hounds in full
cry. Soon the pack appeared, with huntsman and whips in coats of
Lincoln green, and couples across their breasts, and though the hounds

40 THE NEJV FOREST

are no longer like those which Theseus bid the forester " uncouple in the
western valley,"

" With ears that sweep away the morning dew,
Crook-kneed and dewlapped like Thcssalian bulls
Slow in pursuit,"

they are still " matched in mouth like bells," and their greater speed and
symmetry does not detract from the pleasure of listening in the forest to

" The musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction,"

which the hero proposed to Queen Hippolyta. A sharp-faced man
*' lunging " a forest pony, and one or two mounted woodmen and keepers,
completed the party, until the " field " cast up rapidly, the master in
Lincoln green, the rest in quiet blacks and browns. The hounds were
then divided by the whips into groups, and the couples fastened, each
thong being linked to a pair of hounds. Thus one man has to hold from
three to six couple, and that picturesque poise of men stepping backwards
with arms extended and dragging reluctant hounds which has been
painter's and sculptor's subject for centuries is reproduced in perfection.
One ancient and sagacious hound, by name Moonstone, was omitted from
the coupling process. Satisfied that for it the honour was reserved of
finding and separating the deer, it trotted alone at the heels of the hunts-
man's horse, with an air of sagacity and importance most edifying to
behold. After " secret consults " with one or two woodmen, who had
marked deers in the early morning, the huntsman led the way through
thick and beautiful plantations, the coupled hounds and the field following
in long procession. On every side the wood rang with the spring notes
of birds, the laugh of the woodpecker, the cry of the cuckoo, while starry
beds of violet and primrose, and everywhere the sight and scent of leaves
and flowers, made an unusual and beautiful setting to the animated
groups of riders, horses, and .'hounds.

The pack and field halted in a rough common deep in heather and
furze, shut in on three sides by plantations, and on the fourth by the
ancient timber of Gritnam wood. The huntsman and a mounted
keeper, with the old " tufter " Moonstone, then trotted into a large

THE NEW FOREST 41

enclosure on the farther side. " Come on, old dog ! " called the hunts-
man, as the hound stopped to feather on either side of the beautiful
green ride up which the two men were trotting. The keeper pulled up
his cob, and pointed to a clump of beeches surrounded by low brambles
and thorns, remarking, "There were three bucks there this morning."
The hound, which had been casting from side to side of the walk and
through the cover, now bounded towards the beeches, and with a crash
three bucks sprang to their feet, and rushed through the wood, followed
by the loud and musical baying of the hound. The deer did not break
at once, and there was time to join the groups in the common and watch
the dispersion of the inhabitants of the plantation, as the hound twisted
and turned after the bucks. A big fox stepped out, and a doe crossed,
eliciting a chorus of impatient whimpers from the pack before whose eyes
it passed. Then the three bucks crossed the open, followed by the single
hound, whose deep voice was heard for many minutes as he drove them
through the next covert. A blast on the horn now gave the signal that
the deer had separated, and half a dozen willing hands led the coupled
hounds to the ancient wood in which they were to be laid upon the scent.
The long line of men and hounds, followed by the well-mounted field,
hurried along through the long narrow glades of a most beautiful and
ancient wood of oaks, or under arcades of crab-blossoms, ragged gipsies,
brown-coated foresters, hounds and riders, all gradually hurrying on till
the whole cavalcade was pushing at a trot through the forest. A pretty
little black-eyed boy was leading old Moonstone (literally by a string).
" I likes deer-hunting, though 'tis a cruel sport, for the deer does us no
harm," he remarked sententiously, as the procession grouped itselt round
the huntsman, who was sitting alert and eager on his horse in a green ride
at the highest point of the wood, where the single buck had crossed.
All the hounds were now eager and happy, with heads up, sterns waving.
In a few moments they were uncoupled, and dashed down through the
wood. If the scene was not a reproduction of Tudor or Plantagenet
days, the picture of the early poets is sadly misread. Hounds, all black,
white, and tan, spread fanlike across the forest, flinging to right and left,
each giving tongue as it owned the scent ; master, huntsman, and whips
in Lincoln green, under the lights and branching canopy of most ancient
beeches ; well-mounted and well-dressed riders, in the costume, sober in

42 THE NEW FOREST

colours, sound in texture, which good taste and good sense have elaborated
into the perfection of simplicity, now seen, now lost, as they gallop down
the glades, among the tall gray pillars of the beech-trunks, and the gossamer
green of little thorns, and bushes of ivy and wild rose. Surely some
such scene as this must have been in the mind of the author of the
Allegro^ when he bids the reader

" At his window bid good morrow,
Through the sweetbriar, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine.

" Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Cheerly rouse the slumbering morn,
From the side of some hoar hill.
Through the high wood echoing shrill."

A favourite device of a hunted stag in the New Forest is to make
for the wood in which other deer are lying, and disturb them, carrying
the trail right over their " forms." The difficulty of keeping hounds
together when so composed in a thick extensive plantation is very great,
and it often happens that, while the main body of the pack keep to the
scent of the hunted deer, small parties of hounds, or even a single hound,
break off and enjoy a hunt on their own account. It is on record that on
one occasion the pack separated into three, each of which division killed
a deer. One doe was hunted and killed by three hounds only, who were
found eating the carcass. The single efforts of a staghound which is
driving a deer are often extremely interesting, as an example of the per-
severance, skill, and instinct combined possessed by the modern breed. On
the day the opening of which has been described, a stray hound hunted a
buck for a full hour without driving it from one large plantation, giving
tongue at intervals, and sticking to the scent without the encouragement
either of its own companion or of a single rider. At last, a fine fallow
buck, which had not yet shed its horns, broke from the enclosure, and
cantered lightly across the open common, ringing twice or thrice round
clumps of bushes, and lying down for a few minutes to cool itself, though
apparently not at all distressed, in a boggy pool. It then leapt a fence
into a plantation. The hound then made its exit from the wood, and
took up the scent at a swinging gallop, giving tongue loudly at first, but

THE NEW FOREST 43

soon becoming silent as it reached the scene of the buck's circle round
the bushes. At least ten minutes were required to unravel these
difficulties ; but the check did not in the least abate the keenness of the
hound, who brought the line up to the wood, and then with a fine burst
of " music " dashed into the wood, and there pursued its solitary hunt.

Stag-hunting in the forest begins in August, and the meets are held
through September, November, December, January, March, April, and
part of May, thus covering a considerable period when fox-hunting has
either ceased or not begun. Probably the late spring hunting is the most
novel and picturesque experience which a day with the New Forest stag-
hounds affords. But to those who enjoy the sight of hounds working, and
at the same time have a taste for beautiful scenery, nothing could well be
more delightful. Last season, sixty days' sport averaged about the same
number of deer killed. Blank days are unknown, and^ there is the
certainty of a run and of a day's enjoyment.

The New Forest ponies are one of the most interesting features both
of the landscape and the life of this wild country. Now that the deer
are so few as to have disappeared from common view, they are replaced
on the heaths, the lawns, the bogs, and among the ancient trees by the
many-coloured, wild-looking forms of these almost feral ponies. There
is scarcely any portion of the forest — the inmost recesses of Mark Ash
woods, the sea-girt heaths of Beaulieu, the sodden rim of Matley Bog,
or the smooth lawns of Alum Green, of Stonycross, or Brockenhurst —
from which the ponies are absent. There is no solitude in which their
quiet movements, as they tread with careful steps cropping the scanty
herbage, do not break the stillness by day and night, no bare hillside so
barren but the ponies can find on it some humble plant to crop between
the stones.

The brood mares of the forest are perhaps the nearest approach to
the wild horse now existing in this country, so far as their life and
habits entitle them to the name. Many of these have run for twenty
years in the heaths and woods, unbroken, unshod, and almost without
experience of the halter except when " pounded " by the " agisters " for
occasional marking. Their graceful walk and elegant shape, their
sagacity and hardihood, their speed and endurance, and, not least, the
independence and prosperity which their possession confers on the com-

44 "THE NEW forest:

moners and borderers who live in and around the forest, give to these
ponies an interest apart from that attached to the life of any other breed
of domesticated animal in this country. Nearly all the work done else-
where by large horses seems to be performed in and around the forest
by these miniature ponies, drawing miniature carts. Singly, or driven
tandem-fashion, they draw bricks, haul loads of brushwood and poles,
trot almost any distance to markets and fairs in carts and gigs, and will
carry a heavy forester safely and well

"Over hill, over dale.
Through bush, through briar,"

without fatigue or stumble. There is something in the fact of owning
horses — be they only ponies — which seems to raise a man in his own
esteem, and the jolly foresters have an air and demeanour, whether
standing in front of their mud-built cottages, or riding across the heaths
to drive in their various stock, which belongs of right to the equestrian
order of mankind.

" The love of pony breeding," writes Mr. W. Moens, of Tweed,
near Boldre, one of the most energetic founders of the Association for
the Improvement of the Breed of New Forest Ponies, in his pamphlet
on the subject, " lies deep in the breasts of most commoners, not only on
account of its somewhat speculative nature, but for the animals them-
selves. The ponies running in the forest are rarely left for long without
being looked after to see how they are doing, or at least being inquired
after by their owners, of those living near or working in the forest.
Even the very children of borderers know to whom the mares and foals
belong, so that the forest ponies afford much amusement to the forest
folk, and nothing more easily excites them than a rumour that something
or other is about to be done that may injure their interests as regards
their pony stock. Some of the large breeders own as many as one
hundred or more ponies, many forty or fifty, the smaller occupiers own
as many as they can keep in the winter season. These, according to the
fancy of the owners, are distributed in various parts of the forest, where
they are marked by the agisters, or marksmen, by cutting the hairs of
the tails in various ways. Thus the ponies haunting each quarter of the
forest are known, the agister comparing his own marks with those made
by the owner, and with his description of his ponies. Should any ponies

46 "THE NEW FOREST

stray into the parks, other pastures, or the lanes around the forest,
information given to one of the ag-isters causes it to be soon known
to whom the straying ponies, which go by the name of ' lane-haunters,'
belong."

The present system of identification has taken the place of a far more
picturesque and exciting method of marking the stock, the " Drift of the
Forest." This custom was a survival of an Act of Henry VIII., which
ordained that all forests and chases were to be driven yearly within
fifteen days after Michaelmas, and if any mares or fillies were found which
were not likely to bear good foals " the same unprofitable beasts were to
be killed and buried." Long after this drastic command had ceased to
be regarded, the " Drift " was maintained, as a kind of census for the
marking of all forest stock. As nearly as possible on the same day,
keepers, agisters, and owners rode out to drive the different walks of the
forest towards the pounds. These were not necessarily railed enclosures.
The forest hardly contained a fence in the old days, and where, round the
few villages, the roads were bordered by fences, the space between was
ingeniously used as a trap. At Brockenhurst, for instance, the foals,
ponies, cattle, calves, and donkeys were forced towards the lane which,
with its high hedges, runs by the side of Brockenhurst Manor towards
Beaulieu. Once past the manor mill, by the Boldre River, the gate across
the road was shut, and the long lane was filled from end to end with a
promiscuous throng of wild and tame beasts, thrusting, neighing, bellow-
ing, and crowding, like the spoils of Amalek. From ten to twenty men
would join in the work of collecting the animals from the open forest.
This needed both skill and knowledge to perform properly. The wilder
ponies, who had unpleasant recollections of branding and other rough
handling in the pounds, would often make a determined effort to break
back, taking their way at speed through the most difficult and treacherous
ground. There too, as in the runs of New South Wales, the animals
which have been ridden in the business before seemed to take a pleasure in
aiding to secure the wild ones, and the most successful means to bring in
a fugitive was often for the rider to sit still, and leave the pony he rode
to choose its own line, and the time for making the last push which
turned the other back to the herd.

The history of these New Forest ponies is by no means ascertained.

THE NEW FOREST 47

They are not an indigenous animal like the red deer, but the uniformity
in size and appearance suggests a common stock and ancestry. The first
is, however, probably due to the almost feral state in which these ponies
live in the wild district, from which their food-supply is entirely obtained.
No pony above a certain size is likely to survive in the forest, for the
simple reason that it cannot find food to maintain it. In winter, by
browsing all day and the greater part of the night, hardy little
" foresters " of from twelve to thirteen hands high can just make both
ends meet, though they are extremely thin and ragged. But anything
much above that size would need artificial support, and its progeny
would deteriorate. On the other hand, their size does not tend to fall
much below the standard at which Nature sets the limit, which, in the
case of the New Forest pony, seems to be from twelve to thirteen and a
half hands. The natural appetite and needs of these hardy creatures
prompt them to do the best for themselves from day to day with a
constancy hardly to be understood by human beings whose minds are not
concentrated by necessity on the absorbing effort to satisfy the hourly
cravings of hunger. Nature levels up as it levels down, and this is
probably the clue to the uniformity in size of all wild animals, as well as
of these half-wild ponies.

The condition of this stability is of course that man interferes no-
where. But the practice of selecting and selling away from the forest
all the best of the ponies did threaten a marked deterioration in the stock
about ten years ago, not only in size but in quality. Now the " quality "
of the ponies is obvious and unmistakable. They have none of that
lumpiness and want of due proportion so often seen in ponies ; on the
contrary, they are far more like miniature horses, and horses with a strain
of Arab blood in them, as their fine eye, small heads, and high quarters
show. Whatever the origin of the ponies in the past, this high-bred
appearance has a history, and a very interesting one. They are of the
blood of Eclipse, or rather of his sire, supplemented in later years by
Arab strains of historical excellence.

The story of the Arab strain in these ponies is mixed up with one
of the earliest romances of the modern thoroughbred. The Duke of
Cumberland, son of George II., who in his later years became Ranger of
the New Forest, exchanged an Arabian horse for a Yorkshire thorough-

48 rHE NEW FOREST

bred, which he called Mask, after the place from which it came.
Mask was descended from the Darley Arab, brought from Aleppo in
the time of Queen Anne, and from the Byerly Turk, thus possessing
a pedigree going back to the days of Charles I. Mask was, however, sold
for a small sum at the death of the Duke, and remained for some years in
the neighbourhood of the New Forest, where he became the sire of num-
bers of forest ponies, and also of the celebrated Eclipse. Recently the
Queen sent to the forest two thoroughbred Arabs — Abegan and Yirassan
— the former a gift of the Imaum of Muscat. Lastly, in 1891, the
Association for the Improvement of the Breed of New Forest Ponies was
founded at Lyndhurst, which holds an annual show of pony sires, and
grants premiums to such as come up to the standard required, on con-
dition that they are allowed to run in the forest. This pony show is
one of the prettiest sights of the forest year. It is held annually at the
end of April, just as the leaves are appearing on the beeches and thorns,
not in some formal show-yard in a town, but on a lovely lawn outside
Lyndhurst, called Swan Green.

The beauty of this little sylvan theatre has already been described as
the first scene in the forest which presents itself on the way to Mark
Ash from Lyndhurst town. The scene at the spring pony show in the
present year was a busy contrast to the ordinary quiet of the little green.
In these country gatherings the puzzle is to know where the people come
from and how they get there. It had been pouring with rain all the
morning, and the grove beyond the green was dripping with sunlit
showers of drops. Yet a large part of the forest population seemed to
be present. Under an oak on the hillside a white pony, saddled but
riderless, was cropping the leaves from a thorn-bush, in company with
four or five sooty, ragged, wet, long-tailed colts, dragged in from the
forest. Smart well-groomed pony stallions were showing off their
paces on the road on either side. In the centre a ring of about an acre
had been enclosed with hurdles, within which were the ponies, their
owners, or leaders, and the judges ; and around, in the e very-day dress
of working life, the men and boys of the forest. " Wild ponies and
wild people " was the remark of a bystander. But the roughness of the
forester only extends to costume ; his manners are nearly always pre-
possessing, and his conversation, on topics in which like that of pony-

THE NEW FOREST 49

breeding, he is an authority, is as brisk and epigrammatic as that of a
farmer in the Yorkshire dales. Smart people in breeches and gaiters, old
foresters with faces rugged as their oaks, short black-eyed " gippos " pry-
ing and peeping between the broad shoulders of the native race, and all
the school children of Lyndhurst, were grouped round the ring. Within
it, the ponies were being led round in procession before the judges, who,
notebook in hand, were marking the merits and defects of each. A curly-
headed sweep headed the troop, carrying, instead of a whip, his soot-brush,
with which he occasionally whacked his handsome rough pony, a piece
of "effect," which had evidently been carefully thought out beforehand.
Most of their ponies had spent the whole of the last trying season in the
forest, and showed evident signs of the privations they had undergone.
Many had their rough coats still almost unshed. This produces a curious
effect, for though the forest ponies are of all known colours, the masses
of unkempt, shaggy winter coat, which cling to them, are of colours quite
unknown to the eye which only sees groomed horses, or those which have
been out at grass for a few months in a meadow. All sorts of shades of
soot-colour, sand-colour, dusty brown, smoky gray, lie in rags and tatters
on their flanks, colours which alter again when, as in the present case, the
mop-like mass is drenched with wet, or drying in the sun. Yet the
quality of the race shows in the fine head, and large eye, and above all,
when they begin to move. Unshod, and untrained, they step with all the
careless freedom of a race-horse, giving that curious impression of moving
in detail, which the shuffling jog of a coarse bred pony never creates.
The contrast between the animals towed in by halters, with the mud of
the bog still clinging to their flanks, and their civilised relations " in
service," is perhaps the most striking feature of the show. But the con-
dition in which the true forest pony appears after his winter in the open,
is an excellent guide to the size, points and quality necessary for combining
the maximum of speed and strength, with the power to endure the hard
life in which they are born and bred ; and the judges seem to grasp the
"true inwardness" of each pony's merits through any depth of matted
hair and mud, and in spite of any want of flesh between hide and bones.
The privations of the last season fell heavily on all grazing stock,
whether semi-wild, or kept upon the farms. Yet it was remarked that
ponies left to run wild in the forest did better during the long drought

D

so THE NEW FOREST

than those which were " taken up " and put nito pastures on inclosed
land. They got into the recesses of the bogs and swamps, and there
found more food and better, than was available on the burnt-up meadows
of the farms. These ponies must in fact be judged in the first place from
their power to exist as wild animals : the other qualities follow.

The old saying that "a good horse is never a bad colour," seems
true of these " Foresters." In the endless circle moving round the ring,
there was as much difference in the colour of the animals as in the
appearance of the men and boys who led, hauled, or: pushed them round.
On the whole blacks and roans seemed the most numerous. Of seventy
animals in the ring at one time, thirty were either roans, grays or blacks.
As for the two-year-olds, wild little fellows fresh from the forest, awkward,
reluctant, shaggy, and " pixie-ridden " to the last degree, their colours
were so obscured by long hair and wet, that blacks, browns, and bays
seemed all shrouded in a dingy earth colour. But all walked with freedom
and grace, and most would probably have fetched from £j to ^12 as
they stood. It is said that the yearlings if removed to the good pastures
of Sussex, Dorset, or Somerset, will grow a hand taller than their dams.

It must not be supposed, from the rough and poor condition of these
creatures when seen in April, after exposure to the long hard winter, that
their life is uniformly one of privation and hardship. The health and
freedom which they enjoy together make them on the whole a very happy
and contented race. During the summer each sire collects his little troop
of mares, and so far as possible keeps them from the approach of any
rival. In the spring when the foals are born, there are {tvv prettier sights
than the little mares and their young, which they then bring into the
most sheltered and beautiful lawns near that part of the forest which they
haunt. Later in the year, when the sun is hot and the midge and forest
fly — perhaps the greatest pest to horses which exists in England, begin to
worry them in the thick cover and low ground, ponies and cattle alike
leave the low ground at about 9 a.m., and until the afternoon frequent
the "shades" or open ground where they stand close together half
asleep, swishing off the flies with their long tails. The accurate observer,
whose work has been quoted previously, thinks that these shades are
chosen according to the prevailing wind, " sometimes being chosen in the
full sun, where the summer breeze is better felt than in the surrounding

THE NEW FOREST 51

bottoms ; at other times they will stand in a favourite part of some
forest stream, or in a drift away over the railway. Blackdown is a
favourite shade, being a ridge surrounded by bottoms, where there is
plenty of good feed in the driest summers, with abundance of food and
water. This district is perhaps the most favoured of any, being haunted
by over 600 ponies and cattle, or more than one-tenth of the whole stock
run in the forest." This was the district which it was proposed to take
as a military rifle range, a proposal which was successfully resisted largely
on the ground that the ponies would thus lose their favourite summer
haunt.

CHAPTER IV

THE NORTHERN FOREST

Stony Cross — Riifus Stone and the Rufus Legend — A brief for the prosecution of Sir Walter
Tyrrell — The viezu from Stony-Cross Plain — Bramshazv Wood—Malwood — Minstead
and its park.

The great ridge of Stony-Cross Plain divides the northern from the

central forest. Along it runs the ancient road from Winchester to

Ringwood, and thence to the port of Poole. From its summit the

whole of the forest, north, south, and east, is seen in endless waves of

woods ; and in the deep glen below its eastern shoulder is the spot where

Rufus was killed by the arrow of Sir Walter Tyrrell on the evening of

the second of August, a.d. iioo. In the monkish stories the death of

Rufus became a text, not for the vengeance which comes on the despoiler

of the poor, as in the case of the death of the Conqueror's other

children on the scene of their father's oppressions, but of the vengeance

of God upon the robber of the Church. The fate of the brutal scoffer

who mocked at the holy saints, who kept abbeys without their abbots,

sees without their bishops, and the very throne of Canterbury itself

vacant for three years while he fattened on the incomes of the servants

of God, is the theme of ecclesiastical story. It was almost inevitable that

this colour should be put on the sudden death of the spoiler by zealous

Churchmen. Those who see in the denunciations of the Church, and

in the prophecies of an impending requital which were in circulation

up to the day of Rufus's death, a motive, which alters the part of

Tyrrell from the unconscious instrument to the secret emissary of

vengeance, will find some curious circumstantial evidence in an examina-

THE NEW FOREST 53

tion of the spot in which the king's body was found, assuming that
that now marked as the place where Rufus fell is rightly identified.
There is good reason for thinking that in spite of the lapse of time,
tradition in this respect is right. The place is close to Mai wood, where
the king was lodging the night before, and had dined and drunk on the
very day of his death.

Malwood has for centuries, probably from the days of Rufus, been
the residence of men whose business has been to know and visit every part
of the forest in that particular "walk." Those in the house at the time
of the king's death must have had knowledge of the spot where the
body was found. Even if Purkiss, the charcoal-burner, who drove it in
his cart to Winchester, did not mention to the other foresters the scene
of so dreadful a discovery, it is almost certain that after the dispersion of
the party at the lodge, the flight of Tyrrell, and the desperate ride of
Henry to Winchester, in order to seize the succession to the Crown with
the blessings of the Church, which had banned his brother, the domestics
must have stolen down the hill to look at the body where it lay. The
death of princes, even if not followed by the appearance of the caladrus,
the ill-omened bird, which, according to the monkish bestiaries, only
appeared on earth to bring news of the death of kings, must always be
a topic of awe and curiosity to those near the scene, even if fear closes
their mouths and prevents them from paying due reverence to the body.
The murder of Absalom the beautiful in the wood of Ephraim was
known to more than the " captains of the host," though they dissembled
all knowledge of the deed. The descendants of the charcoal-burner,
who carried the body to Winchester, enjoyed for centuries the rights given
them as a reward, among others tbat of taking all such wood as they
could gather " by hook or by crook," dead branches, that is, which have
not yet fallen, but might be broken off, though not lopped by axe or
bill. Thus the evidence as to the exact place of the king's death does
not depend on history, or upon general tradition. It is fixed by a
concurrent and very coherent though independent set of circumstances.
In the first place by the fact which we have glanced at, that by the fixed
and unchanging order of the forest there have lived in continued succes-
sion, within ten minutes' ride of the place, persons employed for eight
hundred years to traverse daily that particular part of the forest, Malwood

54 "THE NEW FOREST

Walk, in the exercise of the same duty, the supervision of the deer and
the wood, men to whom by the very nature of their business every tree,
rivulet, and pool is a familiar object, frequently associated with some
fact, far less important, such as the death of an eagle, or the leap of a
deer, which is a part of the ordinary knowledge of the wood transmitted
from one generation of foresters to the next. Secondly, the spot ori-
ginally marked by an oak tree, was again marked by a stone, set up by
Lord Delaware, then warden of the forest, in 1745, which stone was
afterwards cased in iron in 1841. If the tree which in 1745 was in such
a state of decay that its place was taken by the stone, was the same which
was standing at the time of Rufus's death, it must have been more than
650 years old at the time of its total disappearance — not an impossible age
by any means, for the fragment in Brockenhurst churchyard probably
stood there quite as early, and Gilpin speaks of " a few venerable oaks in
the New Forest that chronicle upon their furrowed trunks ages before the
Conquest." But the tree may have been a shoot, or sapling or seedling,
of the original oak, and still have identified the spot, just as the present
" Cadenham oak," which buds at Christmas, marks the site of the
old tree.

Taking these considerations as adequate to maintain the truth of
tradition as to the exact spot at which the king died, the inferences from
an examination of the ground are as follows. The king was shot, not in
the wood, but at the very edge, almost at the last tree. Immediately
west of " Rufus Stone " the good soil stops, and a very poor, steep,
marshy, slope begins, which runs right up to the top of the hill by Stony
Cross. Wood does not grow on it now, and never could have grown,
for the nature of the soil has not changed, and remains in the
same condition for the growth or non-growth of timber, as in the
days of the Conquest. Again, the legend says that the king was
looking after a wounded deer, " shading his eyes with his hand."
Now he would not have needed to shade his eyes had he been in the
thick forest, though as the deer would naturally run out of the wood
across the open, and the sun was in the west, for it was late on an
August day, the account exactly fits the supposition that William was
standing where he is said to have stood and gazing after the wounded
deer, as it ran out across the Stony-Cross Common, when he received

~^

THE NEW FOREST 55

the fatal arrow, William, then, was in the open, or on the very edge of
the wood. That he should have been shot by accident in such a place,
with a weapon like a bow, seems most improbable. Moreover it is
likely that both he and Tyrrell were waiting for deer to be driven to
them. The place is still a natural pass for deer, and the " Rufus " Stone
stands on the neck of a little bluff, on either side of which driven deer
would naturally pass on their way up the valley, and up which they do
pass now when hunted. Supposing Rufus to have turned and shot one,
his back or side would be presented to the man who was guarding the
other pass below the knoll. On the other hand it was a place which
gave admirable opportunities for the escape of an assassin. Just above,
or over Stony-Cross Plain ran the sound road, along the high open
ridges, straight across the north of the forest, not to Lymington or
Beaulieu, which would probably be ports friendly to the king whose
property the forest was, but across the Avon, out of the reach of
summary forest law, down to Poole, whence ships were constantly
passing over the Channel for Normandy. The course which Tyrrell is
said to have taken fits exactly with the theory that he committed the
murder here, with the intention of instant flight by this convenient
road. The story runs that he rode to the Avon at the spot still called
Tyrrell's Ford, and, there after forcing the smith to shoe his horse
with the shoes reversed, killed the man, that he might not betray him.
A yearly fine paid by the owners of the house where he crossed at what is
still called Tyrrell's ford, is said to record the memory of the passage.
Whether this legend be true in detail or not, it seems agreed that Tyrrell
did escape from Poole to Normandy, and that there, after giving to Abbot
Suger his account of the king's death in which he claimed that it was
accidental, took the unusual step — for a man with a guiltless conscience
— of making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in performing which he died.

The view from the height of Stony Cross Plain, which was the scene
of Tyrrell's Ride, gives perhaps the best idea of the extent of the forest
and its relation to the splendid country which surrounds it. Along the
back of the ridge, on the high firm ground, the ancient road runs from
Cadenham, where it is joined by the main roads from Winchester and
Southampton, straight across the forest, to Ringwood. This northern
ridge is almost the highest land in the forest. Beyond it, far to the

S6 THE NEPF FOREST

south, the whole district falls away to the Solent, beyond which the hills
of the Isle of Wight are distinctly seen. This " prospect " of the forest
has nothing of the chess-board appearance, usual in extensive views in
southern England. Right away to the sea-shore the eye sees nothing but
woods, commons, and heaths, not in squares and patches, but in a succes-
sion of long ridges which seem to run out from right to left from a
shoulder of higher land to the west. Lyndhurst spire shoots up in the
centre, Minstead, Bolderwood, Rhinefield, Wilverly, and Christchurch
bound it on the west. Eastward, the eye ranges across Southampton
Water to the long line of woods, and faintly seen white houses near
Netley Abbey, and the old fortress of Calshot Castle, Thus the whole
southern forest is within sight, with its natural and ancient boundaries of
the Avon Valley, Southampton Water, and the Solent.

Looking backwards, north and north-east, the Wiltshire Downs are
seen, and to the right the chalk hills beyond Romsey, abutting on
Winchester. The two great cities of Wessex, Winchester and Salisbury,
here have joint claims upon the forest. Timber for the roofing of Salis-
bury was cut in Bramshaw Wood, where it abuts on Wiltshire, and
adjacent are the lands of the wardens of Winchester College. Days
might be spent in gazing on this magnificent panorama, without exhaust-
ing its beauties. Across the valley to the north, at the deepest point of
which Rufus met his death, the beautiful beech woods of Eyeworth Walk
and Bramble Hill are spread on the slope like curly fleeces. As the day
goes on, the cattle come trooping up from the woods to seek relief from
the forest flies on the open '-shade" in front of the inn, and the
air is resonant with the music of their bells.

Malwood, where stood the house in which Rufus lay the night before
his death, and where till the present generation, the keeper of Malwood
Walk had his lodge, is the eastern buttress of this high Stony-Cross
Ridge. Sir William Vernon Harcourt's beautiful house now stands
on the site ; long, low, timbered and gabled, it is perhaps the most pleas-
ing of the many new mansions which now stand on sites leased from the
Crown on the ground once occupied by the old lodges. Between
Malwood and Lyndhurst lies the beautiful village and park of Minstead.
It is difficult to account for the change which the barrier of a paling
makes in the general aspect of trees and herbage within and without.

THE NEW FOREST 57

The park was clearly taken from the forest, yet every blade of grass
seems different, and every tree has a "domesticated" look. Probably
this is due to the work of the scythe on the one, and of the inevitable
tendency to improve on nature in the other. Outside, in the forest, the
grass has never been mown, and constantly browsed and trampled by
cattle. The trees have never been lopped, except as the wind tore off
the rotten branches. Thus the grass of the forest is like a bowling alley
set with flowers, the grass of the park, the common and cultivated
verdure of the hayfield. The positive contribution of the park to the
forest landscape is in the number of trees of species not indigenous to the
forest, which are properly planted round great houses. Thus at Minstead
Manor the long drive is fringed by masses of rhododendron twenty feet
high. Their blaze of red flower on the dark-green background of
shining leafage, the yellow clusters of azalea, and the few gigantic
araucarias, which rise from the mass below without a single dead branch,
make a beautiful incident in the midst of the natural forest. The fine
mansion, and ancient and picturesque stables and ofiices, the kennels and
gardens bowered in this mass of exotic shrubbery, with all the evidences
of ancient and distinguished inhabitation suggest a train of thought
different from, but not out of harmony with, that which arises in the
contemplation of the natural woods.

CHAPTER V

THE SOUTHERN FOREST AND BEAULIEU

BeauUeu Abbey and its history — The ruins at St. Leonard's — 77v Solent shore — Cobbetfs
admiration of the view — Sowley Pond — Wild-fowl — The Beaulieu river and Buckler'' s
Hard — Nelson's flagship built in the forest^Commoners and squatters — Their houses at
Hill Top — Forest rights — Pigs and pannage — Szvineherds — Rights of fuel — Future of
the forest.

In the purview of the forest the great and ancient domain of
Beaulieu claims separate and unique consideration. Geographically it is
the riverine and maritime district of the forest, in which the Abbey of
Beaulieu itself, at the head of its tidal river, marks the point of connec-
tion, between the inland portions and the beautiful Solent shore. It was
part of the original forest of William the Conqueror, and might have
remained like the rest of the great hunting-ground, a wild and sparsely
populated region, whose main interest to the modern world is that the
changes, which make history, have been so little felt that in its present
condition it hardly invites historical inquiry, because it presents itself
almost unchanged by centuries, as a fossil fact.

The act of King John in granting this magnificent domain for the
support of an abbey of Cistercians, withdrew it at once and for ever from
the deadening, though conservative, influence of the forest law, and from
that moment Beaulieu has a separate and dignified history, the human
interest of which exceeds that of the forest itself. The resources and
splendour of this domain are such that it has, from the appointment of
its first abbot until the present time, maintained its position as an
imperium in imperio through all the tumults of history. It is of vast
extent, yet the boundaries of the Manor Bank have never been broken or

THE NEW FOREST

59

encroached upon. Backed by the forest and bounded by the sea, fertile
in corn, in wine — the remains of its terraced vineyards and the house of
the winepress still survive — and inclosing nearly the whole of a splendid
tidal river, it could exist as an independent whole, alike in beauty,
position, and natural resources. Whether in mortmain — the "dead
hand " of the Church — or in private possession, its resources have been
consecutively in the power of a single owner, who has enjoyed a prestige

Jllejcr/ljistecL.

Bcdulieu Abbey.

from its possession such as is not conferred by any domain of similar
extent. The privileges granted to the abbots by King John, and con-
firmed by charter after charter of his successors, were at least equal to
those enjoyed by the kings themselves, when the manor was part of their
forest. The abbey enjoyed every ordinary forest right, and some which
were exceptional ; the abbots might hunt within the manor and follow
their game into the forest a bowshot beyond its boundaries ; their hounds
were excepted from the provisions as to mutilation if found in the forest,
and to this day the manor shares with only one other, that of Brocken-

6o THE NEW FOREST

hurst, the privilege of feeding sheep in the forest. The Prince Abbots of
Beaulieu sat among the Lords spiritual in Parliament for 200 years, and
after the confiscation of their estates the prestige of the possession of the
manor seems never to have failed to confer upon its owners the dignity of a
peerage, or a step in rank on those who already enjoyed it. In 1538 Sir
Thomas Wriothesley, Lord High Chancellor, bought the entire manor,
then worth ^^428 6s. 8d. a year, making, according to Cobbett's estimate,
/^8,500 of our money, for ^2,000. He was created Earl of Southampton.
In the reign of William III. Ralph, Lord Montagu, married the heiress of
the Earl of Southamption, and was created Duke of Montagu. Edward
Hussey, who married one of the co-heiresses of John Duke of Montagu,
was created an earl — Earl of Beaulieu. At this time the manor was for
one life divided, for the other daughter of John Duke of Montagu
married the Duke George her cousin. She left a daughter, and the
Earl of Beaulieu dying without children, the estate passed to this
daughter, who married the Duke of Buccleuch. The great-grandson of
that Duke, Lord Henry Scott, became possessor of Beaulieu, and was
created Baron Montagu in 1887. Thus the possession of Beaulieu seems
to carry with it a patent of nobility as well as the enjoyment of one of
the most beautiful estates in England.

The history of the abbey is perhaps as good an example as can be
found of the magnificence, method, and good sense with which these great
foundations were projected, developed, and maintained. The story which
attributes the original grant to a fit of superstitious remorse, may or
may not be founded on fact ; if it is, the subsequent record, of the use
made of the gift is in strange contrast to its inception. The tale is that
the king summoned the abbots of the white-robed Cistercians to meet
him at Lincoln, and that enraged at their hostility to himself, he ordered
them to be trampled to death by wild horses. His soldiers refused to
become executioners, and the abbots fied. Next morning the king
confided to his confessor that he had dreamt during the night that he had
been brought up for judgment before St. Peter, who had handed him
over to the abbots to be beaten, and that he was still aching from the
blows. The confessor induced him to apologise to the abbots, and to
make reparation by founding an abbey of Cistercians at Beaulieu.

There is no need of this legend to account for John's anxiety to have

rHE NEW FOREST 6i

at least one body of powerful and well-affected ecclesiastics on his side.
From the time of this great gift the Cistercians remained loyal to the
king, even against the orders of the Pope himself ; and even during the
interdict, when the whole realm lay under the Papal ban, as the result
of John's quarrel with Rome, these English Cistercians celebrated
Divine service at the command of their abbots, for which they were
excommunicated by Innocent III, The king restored to them their
lands which had been seized on account of the interdict, and at the fourth
Lateran council held at Rome in the year 121 5, at which were present 312
bishops, and more than 200 abbots and priors, the abbot of Beaulieu,
on behalf of King John, impeached Archbishop Langton of high treason
for his share in the direction of the barons' revolt. The founding of
Beaulieu was a piece of policy on the part of the king, the reason for
which is sufficiently clear by its results. But the magnificence of its
development was partly due to fortune. The piety of John's son,
Henry III., enriched it for conscience' sake ; one of his numerous grants
was that of the profits of three years from his stud of horses in the forest,
to pay for masses for his father's soul. In his reign the abbey church
was completed, and the greater part of the buildings in the precinct were
either projected or begun. The church was as large as that of Romsey ;
but though the lines of its foundations have been traced, and are kept
in evidence with the same care which is bestowed on the preservation of
each and every portion of the ruins, the building itself has disappeared.
It is hard to conceive a greater shock to religious sentiment than the
ruthless destruction of this abbey church, while all that was useful for
secular purposes was retained ; the barns and cellars kept for the storage
of the wealth which the land still yielded to its new owner, the stones of
the house of God taken to build Hurst Castle, and the lead of its
roof to cover the towers of the sister fortress at Calshot,

The buildings which remain are still among the most beautiful ruins
of the south, and serve to show the scale on which the abbey was
conceived; and the wisdom which dictated the choice of its site. They
lie on a gently sloping meadow, in which the great wall of the precinct
stands here and there in gray masses, marking the lines of an inclosure a
mile and a quarter round. The mass of the buildings, the church, the
cloisters, the abbot's house, the guest house, and last but not least, the

62

THE NEW FOREST

means and appliances which converted into wealth the commodities which
fed the colony, stood close to the very head of the tidal river. There
were the mill, the storehouses, and a quay, to which the ships from
France, Spain and the Hanse towns came as the natural port of what was
at once an outlet for the trade of the forest, and the seat of a great
industrial community. Part of this quay is submerged; but part remains

covered with grass and flowers; and
this quiet, butterfly-haunted spot is
still called Cheapside. Opposite and
abutting on this quay are the ruins
of the abbey, and the beautiful
"Palace House," the centre of which
is the lofty " Gate House " of the
abbey, while round it the buildings
of a modern mansion are grouped
with such skill that the house forms
a whole as completely adapted to
its setting and surroundings as the
abbey itself. Within the great wall
of the precinct are the refectory,
now converted into the parish
church, and the remains of the ex-
quisite cloister court, of the chapter
house, and of a huge chamber, still
in good repair, in which the guests
of the abbey were housed. This
last is a good example of the
simple, large-minded way in which
the monks set to work to build for
ordinary purposes. They built two
gable ends as wide as they had space for, or where space was no object,
as wide as the forest oaks would give them cross-beams for their roof.
Then they joined their ends by straight thick walls pierced with windows,
thick and massive with no need for buttresses or contrivances to eke
out bad workmanship or save expense. There are several remains of
their great storehouses, a wine-store, and a gable sixty feet wide at the

m>

■w'l-. «&

)

^''^iij

G(Jte House, Beaulieu.

THE NEW FOREST

^3

abbey, and at St. Leonard's, a branch colony nearer to the Solent is
probably the largest building of its kind existing. In the ruins of the
abbey there are enough relics of interest to give material for days of
minute inquiry.

It is hard to understand why Cobbett, whose eye for scenery, and
admiration for the great religious foundations destroyed by Henry VIII. ,
might have been expected to make him view with sympathy and apprecia-
tion, a scene in which two such elements of interest are combined, is

\Pk.

i^ '< * mrtimnf ' ' ^•'' '■'■'»•' iff

I

Beaulieu.

rather cold in his praises of Beaulieu. "The abbey," he writes in his
Ride from Lyndhurst to Godalming, "is not situated in a very fine place.
The situation is low ; the lands above it rather a swamp than otherwise "
— he must mean the lands higher up the stream, for the slopes above the
abbey were the ancient site of vineyards, and necessarily dry and sunny —
*' pretty enough altogether," he continues, "but by no means a fine
place." Few people will be inclined to assent to this. As a site for the
colony for which it was chosen Beaulieu is almost perfect. The lake

64 "THE NEW FOREST

above and the river below, meadows so rich that the elms grow there to
a size which rivals the forest oaks, the background of magnificent woods
which run back for a mile to the crest of the great plain of Beaulieu
Heath which lies above, give an air of propriety and richness to the
surroundings of the abbey for which it would be difficult to find a
parallel elsewhere. The view of the whole, looking up the river, the
natural approach at a time when the forest was a trackless half-desert
region, towards the abbey, the bridge, and the little cluster of houses and
the mill which overhung the dark pool below the river, made it as fine a
place to look at^ which we take to be the meaning of Beaulieu, as could
be desired, and one of the most beautiful heads of an estuary which can
be found in England.^ Cobbett, however, had seen another part of the
ancient domain of the abbey before spending any time at Beaulieu itself,
a place which he declared to have impressed him far more favourably.
Neither Cobbett's conclusions, nor, so far as modern authority goes, his
archaeology, seems quite consonant with facts. But the accident which
took him past Beaulieu to the ruins at " St. Leonard's," led incidentally to
a description of that unrivalled view from the maritime side of the
monks' domain, which is well worth quoting. " Happening to meet a
man before I got into the village, I, pointing with my whip across
towards the abbey said to the man, ' I suppose there is a bridge down
here to get across to the abbey.' ' That's not the abbey, sir,' says he.
*The abbey is about four miles further on.' Having chapter and verse
for it I pushed on towards farmer John Biel's. When I got there I
really thought at first that this must have been the site of the abbey of
Beaulieu ; because the name meaning fine place^ this was a thousand times
finer place than that where the abbey, as I afterwards found, really stood.
After looking about for some time, I was satisfied that it had not been
an abbey ; but the place is one of the finest that ever was seen in this
world. It stands at about half-a-mile distance from the water's edge at
high-water mark, and at about the middle of the space along the coast
from Calshot Castle to Lymington Haven. To the right you see Hurst
Castle and that narrow passage called the Needles : and to the left you see
Spithead, and all the ships that are sailing or lie anywhere opposite

^ A good inn, the Montagu Arms, with modern comfort and old prices, must be
counted among the attractions of Beaulieu.

tHE NEW FOREST

65

Portsmouth. The Isle of Wight is right before you, and you have in
view at one and the same time, the towns of Yarmouth, Newtown, Cowes,
and Newport, with all the beautiful fields of the island, lying upon the
side of a great bank before and going up the ridge of hills in the middle
of the island.

" The ruins consist of part of the walls of a building about 200 feet
long and 40 wide. It has been turned into a barn, in part, and the rest

U w,

'>r'^vVN : K,,\ 1

/ /

''//■;

'. o^Z-

^\

JW^stei' _ , /

V I

Interior of Beaulieu Church.

\ \

into cattle-sheds. But there is another ruin, which was a church or
chapel, and stands very near to the farm-house. This little church or
chapel appears to have been a very beautiful building, A part only of
its walls are standing, but you see, by what remains of the arches, that
it was finished in a manner the most elegant and expensive of the day
in which it was built. Part of the outside of the building is now sur-
rounded by the farmer's garden. The interior is partly a pig-stye,
partly a goose-pen."

E

66 THE NEJV FOREST

Cobbett declared these ruins to have been once the hospital of Knights
of St. John of Jerusalem. Modern authorities say that it was a branch
establishment of the Beaulieu monks, containing their enormous granary,
a chapel, and the lodging for the workers of iron at Sowley, and of the
salt-pits on the shore. Everything remains as it was in Cobbett's time
except that the last of the race of John Biel has departed from the farm.
But the beautiful little chapel is no longer a goose-pen, but covered, floor,
walls, and windows, with a wonderful growth of plants and weeds. It
abuts on the garden of the farm, a handsome solid old house with low
comfortable rooms and a row of dormer windows in the roof. Both
gables of the chapel stand, and the remains of rich niches and carved
work peep out from the ivy and trailing plants. Flowers blossom all
over these walls, roses, cranesbill, yellow barberry in masses, bramble-
blossoms, odd garden herbs, fennel and rue, yellow mustard, honesty,
and beds of " burrs " and pink nettle. It is a perfect sun-trap, and the
black ivy-berries are as big as currants and in bunches so heavy they
hang their heads. But the remains of the enormous barn are the great
sight of the place. It is far larger than Cobbett says. The present
writer makes it 80 paces long and 25 wide. The gable ends are colossal,
built up without window or buttress. Apparently the task of providing
a new roof to cover this huge and high-pitched span was beyond the
powers of later generations, so the front wall was moved back many paces
and a narrower and meaner building fitted within the old one. The
stock-doves fly out of the crevices in these huge gables as if out of a
clifi\ Every buttress on the side walls is " trimmed " with golden fringes
of hard fern, and the ivy stems on the eastern end resemble the knots in
ship's cables.

All the way down through the manor towards the south the ground
falls gradually lower and lower, divided pretty equally between woods
and arable land, with fine farm-houses, the view of the blue Solent
opens out in the way Cobbett describes. Bei/e Vue rather than
Beaulieu would be an appropriate name, the former being proper
rather to the place you look from than the place you look at. The
coast of the forest is here so sheltered by the screen of the Isle
of Wight hills that it is not till within half a mile of the shore, beyond
the ruins at St. Leonard's, that the tops of the oaks begin to incline in

THE NEIV FOREST 67

one direction, the certain sign of sea breezes. The cultivated fields run
down almost to the beach, and partridges may be seen feeding in the
growing corn within a stone's throw of the breakers. Seen across the
narrow waters, the line of the island stretches back eastward beyond the
line of sight, and the visitor might imagine himself on the shores of the
Hellespont, separated only from another continent by the narrow strip of
dissociable ocean, guarded like the entrance to the Propontis by castles
and fortresses, where the parapets and battlements of Hurst break the

T/:e Edge of the Forest near L'^mington.

line of sky, and the series of batteries old and new line the opposite
coast with signs and tokens that here also are set the gates of empire.
The long low sweep of shore which runs from the sandspit at the mouth
of the Beaulieu river to the point at which it begins to be silted up by
the mud deposits of the Lymington river, is fronted by shingle, and
crossed by innumerable groins of oak trunks driven deep into the ground.
Between these the shore slopes up to a green bank, which makes a
beautiful turf drive within a few yards of the sea, backed by hedges as
green and luxuriant as any on the manor, and fields of growing crops.
It is not difficult to picture the "joy in harvest " of those whose lot it is

E 2

68 THE NEW FOREST

to cut and reap the corn by this lovely inland sea, where a man may
leave binding the sheaves, or the mowers rest at midday, and cross the
fence to where the waves come tumblino- in before the fresh breeze
blowing in from the Needles and the island fortress of Hurst. Further
to the south the shore rises with low cliffs, and the shrubs and flowers of
the mainland creep quite down among the shingle ; bramble, and haw-
thorn, grow among the gray and colourless plants of the seashore, and
among the sea-thistles and horned poppies, tiny flowers of wild rose
blossom, so low that their petals look like little pink shells lying
amongst the pebbles.

Lymington, the ancient port of the Royal Forest, as Beaulieu was of
the Abbey Estates, lies further west. Its long well-built street runs at
right angles to the head of the ancient harbour, at the top of the great
mud-silted lagoon which joins it to the Solent. Below the steep hill on
which stands the town are the old quays, building slips, and wharves, so
close that the masts of the vessels seem to rise among the apple-trees of
the gardens. In the meadows near the harbour's mouth are quaint old
docks and the remains of what were once elegant pavilions and boat
houses. But the sea trade of Lymington has passed to Southampton,
and its seaside visitors have deserted it for the Bournemouth sands.

The change from coast to inland scenery, which a few minutes'
walk may show, is among the strangest features of a visit to
the forest shore. A journey of a few hundred yards along the
channel of a little rushing stream, brings the visitor before a fine
inland lake, sheltered on nearly every side by woods, and with
deep fringes of sedge and reeds ; a perfect paradise for wild-fowl.
In the winter this lake is the great resort of the duck, teal, and
widgeon, which haunt the waters of the Solent, and come here for rest and
quiet during the day, or in rough inclement weather. Beaulieu is
almost unrivalled as a resort of wild-fowl. In hard weather wild swans
haunt the quiet river, and geese, widgeon, and duck of all kinds are found
in numbers, which recall the days of Colonel Hawker, the " father of
wild-fowling," whose exploits on the Solent in pursuit of his favourite
sport formed one of the earliest and best of British books on wild life.
The flamingo which was shot on the river, and is now stufi^ed at Palace
House, was clearly a wild bird ; its delicate white and pink feathers are

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70

THE NEW FOREST

in perfect condition, free from any break or soiling, which is the certain
mark of captivity in wild-fowl. Ospreys visit the river to feed on the
mullet, trout, and salmon peel ; and on the heaths beyond black-game
are still found. It is said that these are gradually decreasing all over the
forest, partly from the number of foxes, partly owing to the ravages of
the oologists.

A Creek on the Beaulieu River.

As for the Beaulieu river, there is nothing like it in England.
or rather like that part which begins at Beaulieu bridge, and
falls into the Solent nine miles below. All the waters of those
forest streams, those marshes, bogs, and swamps which you have
crossed, leaped over, or sunk into in exploring the northern forest, are
at last choked into a wide mere, which would be called a " broad "
in Norfolk, by the narrowing of the valley and some ancient engineering

THE NEW FOREST 71

devices of the monks, and then, through a weir opposite the gate
of the Palace, the fresh water from the forest above pours into
the salt-water river below. Thus above the bridge are water-lilies,
below it seaweed ; and from that point a beautiful broad salt river, rapid
and sinuous, sweeps through oak woods, and meadows starred with
flowers like the meads above Oxford at Rosamond's Bower, yet never
quite foregoes that dignity which it borrows from the sea, whose
doubled tides advance to fill it not twice, but four times in the twenty-
four hours. Here then is a tidal river in which " low water " is but
only a change for an hour or two in the landscape, a river whose
bed shows only yellow gravel, or little sheets of saltings crowded by
feeding birds, and backed by woods, where the banks are disfigured by
no towing path or foul factories, and whose silent waters are broken not
by steam-tugs and barges, but by fleets of shining swans. Little winding
creeks run up into the woods, bordered by close-set rows of dark oak
piles, and roofed by the clustered trees, creeks in which you might expect
to find the "keel" of some prying Dane docked, while its blue-eyed
crew crept up through the woods to spy out the land, or the hidden
piraguas of the sea pirates who plundered Panama. Nor is this a mere
fanciful suggestion from the scenery. War and opportunity lead
to much the same results, whatever the date; and here in 1704
Beaulieu Palace, nine miles up an English river, was fortified by John,
Duke of Montagu, with a moat, walls and towers against the possible
attack of French privateers,^ a precaution which seems less strange
than it might, in the light of the plunder of the Earl of Seafield's
plate by Paul Jones, as to which a curious correspondence recently
appeared in the newspapers.

The woods which run for miles along the river banks are perhaps
equally ancient with the oldest in the forest — ancient that is as having
always been wooded ground. But their character is wholly difl^erent.
They are the woods of a manor, grown for profit, carefully tended, and
full of the close and beautiful "sous bois," or underwood, which in the
forest has disappeared, and left only the " haut bois," or timber trees.

1 Others account for the moat and turrets round Palace House by the taste tor
French architecture acquired by the duke in his residence abroad. Part ot the woods
were also laid out on the French system.

72

THE NEW FOREST

The woods on the opposite bank have that " carded " look, Hke curly
hair combed, which sea-breezes give to trees as well as to sailors' locks ;
but except for this and the cries of the lapwings and the redshanks in
the rushy meadow below there is nothing in the view which opens on
leaving the wood to suggest that the water in front is anything but
an inland lake. It winds between the hills exactly like a branch of
Virginia Water. On the low ridge to the left is a square built village of

BeauUeu River at Buckler's Hard.

good old red brick, brown tiled houses ; not so much a village indeed as a
street, running at right angles to the river, and looking like a section of
old Portsea cut away and set down in the woods. And that is exactly
what it is ; a fragment of the great arsenal, left high and dry by time on
the shores of the Beaulieu river. Here, on the green slope where the
cattle feed and children play, was built of Nev/ Forest oak, Nelson's ship
the Agamemnon., 64, the ship which he was commanding when he lost his

THE NEW FOREST 73

right eye at the siege of Calvi, the ship which carried his flag in the
battle of the Baltic, one of whose crew, at the battle of St. Vincent,
tucked under his arm the swords of the Spanish officers as if gathering
sticks for a faggot. Those whose boding fancy foresees a time when no
sign will be left of the great industries of the North but burnt-out cinder
heaps, should consider the history of Buckler's Hard.

In the middle of the last century, John Duke of Montagu, Lord of
Beaulieu, and owner of the great sugar-island of St. Vincent, and inheritor
of the rights of the Abbots of Beaulieu to a free harbour upon his river,
determined to make a seaport at Buckler's Hard. It was a far-sighted
scheme, in view of the American trade, which posterity has justified by the
creation of modern Southampton. Grants of land at a nominal rent, and
of timber delivered free, soon attracted shipbuilders to the spot, and in
September, 1743, the Surprise^ 24, the first battleship built on the river
was launched. From that time till the end of the great war, the work
grew and prospered. Frigates succeeded sloops, and battleships frigates,
and each vessel after it left the slips, was taken round to be fitted and
manned at Portsmouth. The Surprise went out to fight the French in
May, 1750; the Vigilant, 64, 1,374 tons, in 1774; the Hannibal, 74,
was launched in 18 10. The Agamemnon, after carrying Lord Nelson
through the battle of the Baltic, and taking her share in Trafalgar, was
lost in Maldonado Bay in the River Plate in 1809; the Indefatigable,
the Illustrious, the Swiftsure, line of battle-ships, and a whole fleet of
frigates were launched at Buckler's Hard during the latter years of the
war. Such was the skill of the builders and the resources of the place
that a seventy-four gun ship was not longer than thirty months upon the
stocks, though 2,000 oaks, 100 tons of wrought iron, and 30 tons of
copper, were worked into her fabric. The whole of this great industry
was created and directed by one man, Mr. Henry Adams, who carried it
on for sixty years, and lived till the age of ninety-two. His sons
succeeded him; and the ruin of Buckler's Hard was due, not to the failure
of its resources, but to the deliberate action of the Admiralty. The
Adamses were commissioned to build four ships at once, and for not
delivering them by the date agreed on, were ruined by fines and litigation
at the instance of the Government whom they served. Of their once
prosperous yard, no sign remains but the houses they built, and four

74 "THE NEW FOREST

grass-grown hollows in the shore which were the slipways of the battle-
ships. In one of these, filled with water at high tide, lies the rotting
skeleton of a wooden vessel, her stem and stern posts still upright, while
from her back project the broken and distorted ribs, and bent bolts of
copper. From a tree in the garden of what once was the home of the
Adamses, there still waves, as if in mockery, a ragged Union Jack.

The squatters' houses which fringe the forest, are the subject of much
amusing legend and odd domestic history. They illustrate the unsettled
and lawless condition which prevailed in the district towards the end of
the last century, better, perhaps, than any other feature of the forest.

A favourite site for their colonies was on the fringe of some great
estate projecting into the Crown Forest. At Beaulieu, for instance, the
boundary of the property is called the " Manor Bank." South and east
of the Abbey it abuts on high flat open heaths ; and there the line of
division is a bank in the literal sense, a high rampart of earth separating
the cultivated land and plantations of Beaulieu from the wild and open
forest. To this bank, the cottages of the commoners and squatters cling
like swallows' nests to the eaves. It is said that in the old days of en-
croachments, custom ruled, that if a house were once built, roofed^ and
a fire lit within, it was not in the power of the Crown to pull it down.
Occupation, and not architecture, was the object of the squatters, and
the game of house-building in the forest was soon played with a skill
born of long practice, which baffled the spasmodic fits of energy on the
part of the authorities. It reached such a stage of perfection that the art
of building, roofing, putting in a chimney, and lighting a fire within the
space of a single winter's night was at last attained ; and the curl of smoke
rising defiantly in the gray of a December morning was the signal that
the squatter had triumphed, and that henceforth he was irremovable.
Some of these little cabins are still used, though more commodious
dwellings have been added to them. Others stand, or are tumbling
down, in the gardens of later buildings. Fifty years of settled and
prosperous occupation have not given them the complacency of the
humdrum cottage. They never quite lose the hasty, half-defiant look
which is their birthmark, though their present owners enjoy a degree of
security, independence, and general goodwill, which their honourable and
industrious lives fully justify. The ancient contrast of the life within

THE NEW FOREST 75

and without the " pale," is nowhere more picturesquely suggested than
by the line of old cottages at " Hill Top," at the edge of Beaulieu
Heath. The cottages are all set in narrow strips of garden, won from
the heath. These bits of ground are now fertile and well cultivated.
The houses themselves present an odd contrast of original poverty and
present comfort. In structure they are, for the most part, of the
roughest, and by no means most durable order. Some are of one story,
some of two. The walls of all, or nearly all, are of yellow clay, some-
thing like the " cob " or " clay-lump " cottages and barns of South
Devon. The roofs are straw-thatch, though in some this has been
replaced by slate. The material of the walls seems hardly adequate to
support two stories, for in many the wall bends inwards, and the lattice
windows, and wooden frames seem to have taken kindly to the curvature.
In some of the gardens the original house, which gave the " claim " to
the land, still remains, a kind of "doll's house," which was enough to
support the legal fiction of occupation. Most of the cottages have little
pony-stables, piggeries, and wood-stacks attached, and though the exterior
is humble and sometimes dilapidated, a glance at the interior gives every
evidence of comfort and good living. The rooms are well and sub-
stantially furnished, with abundance of brightly kept household gear.
There are flowers in the windows, pretty curtains and blinds, and the
small and pleasing evidences of a mind so far free from the hardships of
life as to find time for the enjoyment of its minor amenities. Above all
the children are healthy, well dressed, and in many cases of singular
beauty. There is one type which seems common in these cottages on
the high uplands of the forest, gray eyes with dark lashes, small regular
features, and a complexion of the most delicate pink and white, not the
common cherrv-cheeked complexion of rustic good looks, but of a far
purer and more refined order, which seems as characteristic of the
children of the forest as their quiet and reserved demeanour.

Men living the life of these commoners, attract an amount of
interest and sympathy which must have its root in an appeal to some
widely diffused and common sentiment. They are not a numerous class,
the owners of from one to twenty acres being about 580. But these only
hold -^Lth part of the land entitled to rights of common, which are always
attached to some particular house or piece of land. These are let by the

76 THE NEW FOREST

great proprietors to tenants who pay rent both for houses, land and forest
rights, and make the same use of them as is done by the small freeholders.
Both are an extremely honest, industrious and independent class of men,
among whom theft is unknown, and drunkenness and improvidence
extremely rare.

The existence of both is dependent upon the forest rights which they
enjoy, the nature of which is better ascertained than their origin. In the
case of many holdings the title is extremely ancient, in others a claim to
ownership made by a squatter has probably been followed by a concession of
common rights. Their present extent is very carefully defined. The
first and most important is the right of pasture for all kinds of cattle but
goats and sheep, except in the case of the owners of the Manors of
Beaulieu and Brockenhurst. 5,469 cattle were turned out in the forest
by commoners in the year 1892. The second is the " common of mast,"
or right of feeding hogs, otherwise called " pannage " ; and this is so
valuable that in a good acorn year each pig run in the torest is said to
increase ten shillings in value, without cost to the owner.

"Pannage time" lasts, properly speaking, from September 25th
to November 22nd ; but though the Crown has the right to impound
pigs found in the forest at other times, this rule is seldom enforced.
When there are no nuts and acorns. New Forest pigs graze almost like
cattle, cropping the grass with their teeth. Formerly they must have
been the most characteristic animal of the forest, after the deer. Cobbett,
on his ride to Beaulieu from Lyndhurst, says: " Of pigs this day we saw
many, many thousand. I should think we saw at least a hundred hogs to
one deer. I stopped at one time and counted the hogs and pigs just round
me, and they amounted to 140, all within fifty or sixty yards of my
horse,"

The gathering of the pigs in " pannage time " was until recently one
of the most complete survivals of Saxon days known in this country.
The swineherd received from each commoner the pigs he wished fatted,
with a small payment for each animal, A convenient place had been
previously selected for a rough sty, where there was plenty of beech-mast,
acorns, and water, " In Bolderwood Walk," says Mr, Rogers, author
of the " Guide to the New Forest," " there were many favourite localities,
as it contained the greatest number of beech tree3. When the spot was

THE NEW FOREST

11

reached by the collected hogs, they were generally tired by their long
journey, but an abundant supper was provided for them, and they woke
up next day refreshed by a good sleep." This thoughtful provision for
the pigs' comfort is characteristic of the high respect in which the friendly
forest pig is held by its owner. " Plenty of food was then given them
for breakfast, the ' herd ' meanwhile blowing his horn ; after which they
had a little liberty, a few old ' pannage hogs ' accompanying them as

Highdife.

leaders. They usually did not want to stray far, as food was very
abundant, and in the evening were called by the horn, and fed as before.
After two or three days they were as obedient as possible, and would
assemble at any time on hearing the signal."

The old-fashioned, wild-looking, rust-coloured pig seems to have
disappeared from the forest, and good black modern swine have replaced
them. But they take very kindly to the life, and no one can know what
an intelligent, cleanly animal the pig is by nature till he has seen him
roaming half wild among the big trees, and apparently by common

78 THE NEW FOREST

consent, the leader in all the daily movements for food, shelter, water, of
the mixed herd of cows, ponies, and donkeys with which he associates.

There are two minor common rights, probably very ancient, both of
which are much prized by their possessors. They confer the right of
fuel on the cottages to which they are attached. One is the right of
" Turbary," or cutting turf on the heaths, the other that of " Estovers "
or fuel. The turf right is not much used, except by the forest com-
moners ; and while stick gathering is so easy in the wooded parts of the
forest a poor man need never want small fuel. The rights of " Estover "
are supposed to date from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who enacted
that " no inhabiters of any house builded since the beginning of the
Queen Majesty's reign that now is, shall be allowed any wood in the
same forest to be burnt or expended therein." This right was much
abused, as whole trees of oak and beech were assigned, for the right
now applies to the timber of the hard-wood trees. This is now supplied
from the " waste of the forest," and by some curious result of the
drawing of recent acts, not from the inclosed young plantations, but
from the old woods of the Stuarts or Elizabeth. The right is, how-
ever, being bought up by the Crown when practicable, and the number
of loads is reduced from 800 to 367.

The future of these ancient woods is a matter of some concern to
those who are intrusted with the management of the forest. It is feared
that as the old trees die there will be few or no young trees to replace
them, as the greater number are destroyed by the cattle when saplings.
Meantime the 20,000 acres of Crown plantations are growing up to take
their phice, and as these are thrown open, the area covered with timber
trees will increase instead of diminishing. Meantime, when frost and
storm have widened the breaches in the Tudor woods, portions can be
inclosed from time to time for natural reproduction and the preservation
of that balance of wood, heath, swamp and pasture which makes the
scenery of the New Forest unique among the beauties of England.

INDEX

Adder-catcher, The, 32, 33
Alum Green, 27
Avon, The, 6

Beaulieu, 5, 6, 58
Abbey, 58
Gate House, 62
Heath, 22
River, 68, 70

Bogs, The Forest, 26

Brockenhurst, 10, 34

Buckler's Hard, 73

Cadenham Oak, 54
Calshot Castle, 6, 61
Charcoal Burner's Hut, 19
Christchurch, 6
Cobbett, 7, 23
CufFnaU's Park, 12, 14

Deer, 38, 39

„ hunt, 39, 40
Dennv Bog, 23

Forest Law, 7, 8

Gritnam Wood, 20, 26

Heaths, The Forest, 22, 23, 24
Henry H., 8, 53
„ HI., 8, 61

Herons, 27, 30
Honey-buzzard, 32
Hurst Castle, 61
Hussey, Edward, 60

Innocent HI., 61

John, King, 58

Knightwood, 28

Oak, 28

Langton, Archbishop, 61
Lingard, 6
Lymington, 5, 6, 68

,, River, 17

Lyndhurst, 10, 12, 24

Emery Down, 14

Malwood, 5, 53, 56

So

INDEX

Mark Ash, i8, 21
Matley Heath, 23
Matley Wood, 24
Minstcad Park, 56

Ober Heath, 22
„ Water, 23
Otters, 28
Ouse, 6

Poole, 54, 55
Ponies, 4.3
Pony Show, 48
Purkiss, 53

Ralph, Lord Montagu, 60
Rhinefield, 23
Ringwood, 12

Rouen, 5

Rufus, 6, 12, 52
" Stone, 54

St. Leonard's, 63, 64
Southampton Water, 6
Stony-cross, 52
Swan Green, 14, 48
Swine, 76

Tyrrell, Sir Walter, 52

Verderers' Hall, 10
Vinney Ridge, 27, 28, 30

William L, 6, 10
Winchester, 5, 53
Woodcock, 24
Wriotheslev, Sir Thomas, 60

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